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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Year End Issue | The rapes we don’t report
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Year End Issue | The rapes we don’t report

How a Dalit schoolgirl is negotiating life after a gang rape and a murder

For many girls in rural India, school is their ticket to a better life. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/MintPremium
For many girls in rural India, school is their ticket to a better life. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint

After they had finished raping her, the 15-year-old schoolgirl remembers what the two men in the car told her. “Don’t bother telling anyone. Don’t bother complaining to the police. Nobody cares about a low-caste girl." Then they added: “Come back to us in 10 days. If you’re not here, we will do to your mother what we’ve done to you."

Then, they slowed down the car, dropped the girl off, and sped away. It was 6 August 2012.

The girl had earlier that year been promoted to class XI, the first person in her family to get that far. At her school in the village, the Sanskrit teacher remembers her as a “bright" student, not very regular with attendance but someone who made up with enthusiasm when she did show up. When she cleared class X, she was done with the village school. Two years of high school were a short bus ride away from home to the nearest town.

When they grabbed her, she had just got off the bus and was walking the remainder of the short distance to school. It was 9.30 in the morning, she remembers. She hadn’t wanted to go to school that day. Her father, a daily-wage labourer, had already gone off in search of work to the fields nearby and her mother was out on some chores. Her younger sisters and brothers had left for the local school. “My uniform wasn’t washed," she says. But a neighbour dropped in. “Missing again? This can’t go on. You must go."

And so, reluctantly, she went, unaware that they were waiting for her, the two men, a 20-year-old from a neighbouring village and his 36-year-old uncle. Waiting in a car with tinted windows, they hit the accelerator as soon as they spotted her, stopping just to drag her inside.

For the next 2 hours they drove around, taking turns to rape her, twice each. When they were done with her, they dropped her off, warning her to return after 10 days so that they could rape her again.

She did not go back. Did they wait for her at the place where she was supposed to meet them so that they could rape her again? Did they curse each other for perhaps not beating her or scaring her enough? Who knows? The girl didn’t show up.

Then on 3 September, less than a month after she was raped, her mother went missing. The 38-year-old mother of five never knew what had happened to her eldest child that day in August. She did not know about the rape or the obvious complicity of her neighbour. The girl says she was just too embarrassed to tell her mother. When she got back home, the neighbour had asked her to take a bath. Then she took her clothes and washed them.

Now the mother had left home in the morning to go to the market to buy medicine, it was getting late and there was no sign of her. As night fell, the worried girl went to her father to finally tell him what had happened. She was scared, she said. What if the men had picked up her mother? They wouldn’t act on their threat, would they?

Her father was taking no chances. A few years ago, his brother’s wife had gone missing. Just like that, gone without a trace. “She was mentally challenged," the police officer at the local police station says when I ask him about it. “Who knows where people like her run off to?"

Now the girl’s father was back at the police station, trying to register a complaint. “A Dalit man complaining about a missing wife is never taken seriously," says Savita, a social worker who uses no last name. “Of course they hounded him out with a couple of abuses."

Two days later a decomposed body was found floating in the canal nearby. Once again, the girl’s father made the trip to the police station, this time not to report a missing wife but to identify her body. She had been beaten, tortured, raped, killed, and dumped.

I first met the girl six months after she had been raped, for a film I was making for Miditech, a production house. She was home in her two-room house in Haryana’s Karnal district. A bunch of gnarled carrots and a few unripe tomatoes waited to be cooked for dinner as she talked inside a dimly lit room with a poster of the goddess Durga astride a tiger and a sliver of mirror nailed to the wall. Someone had scrawled in Hindi below it a solitary word: Ma.

After the mother’s murder, the two men and the neighbour had been arrested after the police finally began an investigation. A single armed guard who had been provided for the family’s protection accompanied the father while the girl said she stayed home because “they will catch me". The families of the men in the nearby village were waiting and watching, she feared.

I drove through that village, accompanied by Savita, who pointed out the younger man’s house to me: a two-storey building with terracotta tiles and carved columns in an area where people of the upper-caste Rod community live. On the balcony two women were hanging baby pink garments out to dry. Who did they belong to? A niece of the accused? How were the older women related to the 20-year-old? And what did they make of the charges against him? Were they angry and ashamed? I have no way of finding out. Savita urgently suggested we move on before things turned ugly. I followed her advice and went to meet the sarpanch instead.

“These are isolated incidents," says the sarpanch, Hansraj, a Jat farmer. “There is no need for fear. These things don’t happen in my village." So how does he explain the spurt in reported rapes throughout Haryana? He is silent but a younger man, Jagan, a mechanic, explains to me that in 80% cases the “girls are to blame".

“They make friends with boys. They get into relationships. And when the relationship comes out into the open, they say they’ve been raped and the boys get trapped."

******

Six months after I first met her, I am back at the village in Karnal to see how life has changed for the girl after she was raped and her mother murdered.

Six months ago, the girl had proudly shown me the first chulha (hearth) she had made. She posed for photographs, smiling shyly, with her younger sisters. Now, it takes me a minute to recognize the girl who enters the room, carrying a sack of just-harvested rice on her head. She is thinner and looks older. The smile is gone.

She makes me a cup of tea and talks about her day, an unrelenting routine that begins at 4am to tend to the family’s buffalo. Then it’s time to make the tea, make rotis, get the four younger siblings ready for school, wash clothes, clean the house, feed the buffalo again in the evening, cook dinner and then sleep, seldom before midnight. Along with all of this, she must juggle court dates for hearing that often get adjourned and appear there to testify.

Soon after news of her rape filtered out, the then principal of her higher secondary school struck her name off the rolls, she says. In any case, it’s impossible for her to go to school—she needs to stay home and take over her mother’s chores now that she is dead.

At 16, the schoolgirl had to become an adult. She worries like one. But she’s also still just a teenage girl. So she frets about money and the sort of legal fees her father is paying to the lawyer he has hired from the financial compensation her family received from the state. But she also worries about not having any new clothes.

She understands that if her father marries again, the workload on her will reduce, but she worries that his new wife might ill-treat her younger brothers and sisters. She is saving to buy her sister a new uniform that she desperately needs but grumbles that she doesn’t chip in enough with the housework.

She worries that she will never be able to get out of her village and will forever be labelled as “that" rape victim but she thinks she might be able to get married in the years ahead.

“If I step out of the house or even smile, people in the village pass comments, ‘See how shameless she is to smile even though her mother died because of her,’" she says.

Her father no longer gets work because the upper castes who own the land want to teach him a lesson for refusing to “compromise", she says. Former classmates and girlfriends now shun her because their parents don’t want to antagonize the powerful families of the accused.

Her accused rapists remain behind bars. But the raped girl struggles within her own invisible prison.

“There is nothing romantic about village life for young girls," says Savita, the daughter of a bank manager who completed her bachelor’s in arts from Kurukshetra University. “We cannot dress up. We cannot wear jeans. We cannot even laugh. If someone harasses us, we are asked, ‘What did you do to provoke it? Was your head covered?’ I tell my cousins in the village to get out as fast as they can. There is nothing for them there."

This morning the schoolgirl finds an hour of freedom as we wander in the market nearby for an hour. She buys some fabric to gift her grandmother. “Nani comes over sometimes. I like it when she does," she says. She doesn’t want to give it to the tailor to stitch, though— 130 is a lot of money when there is her mother’s sewing machine at home and she can, incredibly, steal the time from her regular chores to stitch it. When I drop her back home, she asks when I will come again.

Yet, she’s not entirely alone. Recently, a non-governmental organization, the KD Singh Foundation run by the Trinamool Congress’ Rajya Sabha MP K.D. Singh, arranged for her to take her examinations as a private student at a nearby school. Textbooks for Hindi, English, fine arts, physical education and home science have been bought for her. But the only time she can study is late at night after the rest of the family is asleep.

“If I study, then maybe I can get admission to a hostel nearby. The NGO people say they can get my father a job and maybe then we can all move out of here," she says.

There is tremendous pressure on the girl and her father from the families of the accused to “compromise", she says. “They have offered me either 60 lakh or 2 acres of land," the girl’s father tells me. It’s a huge sum of money for anyone, more so for a man fighting with his back to the wall against a system that is loaded against him. But “money", he says, “cannot compensate for my dignity."

And, you, I ask the girl, what do you want?

She looks me in the eye: “They took away my self-respect. They killed my mother. I want only justice. I want them to hang."

Then she looks down at her hands and adds: “Did you know I was my class monitor? My teachers said I could become anything, even a bank manager."

And then she breaks down and cries.

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Published: 28 Dec 2013, 01:14 AM IST
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