On the night of 17th September 1999, Budhadev Karmaskar entered a brothel on Jogen Dutta Lane in Calcutta. He then proceeded to violently attack and kill a sex worker. A trial Court convicted him under Section 302 of IPC to life imprisonment and the High Court of Calcutta upheld this conviction. When this case of murder eventually reached the Supreme Court as Budhadev Karmaskar v State of West Bengal in 2011, the Apex Court not only dismissed Karmaskar’s appeal against the conviction, but invoked Article 21 of the Constitution to assert that sex workers too had a right to a life of dignity.
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