(Editor’s note: This was first published on Yahoo.com as a single piece. We are reproducing the long form report in parts for TwoCircles.net readers.)
You are 13, kidnapped from your street along with three friends, drugged, raped, and dumped 150km away. No one could possibly blame you, but they do. The authorities investigate you instead of the accused men. What appeal does a young Dalit girl from Bhagana, Haryana bring to a nation that thinks it has now become sensitive to sexual assault? Is it enough to live on the pavement at Jantar Mantar for months on end, hoping someone will notice your call for justice? How long will your fight for a new life last?
A Portrait of the Indian as a Young Dalit Girl: Part 1 – The PlaygroundA Portrait of the Indian as a Young Dalit Girl: Part 2 – Sisters, MothersA Portrait of the Indian as a Young Dalit Girl: Part 3 – Meeting JanviA Portrait of the Indian as a Young Dalit Girl: Part 4 – The girls speak outBy Priyanka Dubey
On July 21, 2014 the parents of three of the four girls were sitting inside Room No 434 of the lawyers’ area situated in the Hisar mini-secretariat. They had woken up at 3 am at their Jantar Mantar camp in Delhi. Then they walked to Kashmiri Gate and got on the cheapest bus available to reach Hisar in Haryana. The girls’ case was listed for hearing that day in the Haryana trial court.
When I arrive in the morning, the families are sitting in the protest camp outside the mini-secretariat. Over the last two years, some of the families have made do at the camp. Others have started living in small rented rooms in Hisar. The families from the Chamar and Khanti communities who have been in Hisar for two years helped the Dhanuk families find daily wage work and cheap places to live. All of them take turns to sit at the Hisar protest site.
Later in the lawyer’s chamber, the girls’ lawyer Jitendra Khush told the parents about recent developments in the case. None of it was good news.
On July 8, Jitendra Khush and his senior Ram Niwas had filed an application in the Hisar court for a re-investigation, arguing that the Haryana police had been biased and negligent. They also argued that the magistrate had violated the provisions of Section 164 (CrPC) by not giving the girls the mandatory warning that they only had to make the statement if they felt unafraid and comfortable, that there was no compulsion for them to make it right then in the middle of the night. Despite the victims mentioning that they knew three of the assailants, the magistrate did not ask the girls to identity them, nor did he mention any names in the recorded statement.
The lawyers’ application further argues that there was a caste bias on the part of the authorities towards the Dalit girls. Despite corroborating the statements of the victims and their families who accuse sarpanch Rakesh Panghal and his uncle Virendra of conspiring in the abduction and gang-rape of the victims, the police have not filed any charges against them. Moreover, the application questions the Haryana police for trying to discredit the allegations of the survivors by dropping Section 328 of the IPC from the charge-sheet.
In a written reply that had arrived the morning of July 21, the Haryana police categorically denied all charges and asserted that the investigation was done properly. And brought in a shocking new red herring. In their response, the police said they had looked at the “call details of the victims.” To sum up, they found a phone, which they say, belonged to one of the girls. They say that the GPS data indicated that before Bhatinda Railway Station, the phone was last located at a place called Sathrod. The police argued that the girls would have had to change two trains to reach Bhatinda, and this could not have been possible if they were unconscious. The police also say that the girls’ medical reports do not prove the presence of any sedatives (considering the medical examination was done almost two full days after their abduction, this is unsurprising).
I have been here before with police massaging the evidence of difficult sexual violence cases into a story of romance, youthful high spirits or honor killings – shifting the blame to the victim or the victim’s family. As I was following the story of the girls of Bhagana, another gang-rape case I had reported on, one that had ended in murder, was taking that direction in Uttar Pradesh.
I asked Khush how the mobile phone location of one girl confirmed the presence of other three with her. And at a more fundamental level, where had the police found this phone and how had they established that it belonged to the girls?
Khush was firm. “But the police are right. The eldest girl had a phone! Don’t you see the call records? 99.9 % rape cases here are like that only. They are all consensual,” he added. The parents were puzzled and quiet. Part of it was that they had trouble following non-Haryanvi Hindi.
I asked why he didn’t believe his own client, and how he could say that most rapes in Haryana were consensual. “So what do you think about those numerous cases in which women file a complaint after one or two years of being raped? And sometimes they say that they were being raped continuously for months? How is it possible? I think first they form relations with consent and then file charges of rape later if they feel cheated or neglected. And in this case, call records show that the girls went on their own.”
Back in Delhi, a team of lawyers from the non-profit group Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) has been fighting a separate case in the Supreme Court for the compensation and proper rehabilitation of the Bhagana Dalits. They believe that the gang-rape is a new extension in crimes against Dalits in that region.
I went to see the Hisar SP Vikas Dhankar, who also has an office in the mini-secretariat. He emphasized that they have been diligent in their investigations. And unbiased, of course. With a distressed expression, he said, “Lower caste? You should know that these lower caste people are now coming out and filing complaints against the atrocities happening to them. The situation is not like how it used to be years ago. And I tell you, wait for next 10 years. This whole caste system will get finished itself. You see, with all these inter-caste marriages happening around, how can caste survive?”
*Names of all rape survivors and their relatives have been changed.
(Republished with thanks to Yahoo.com, Grist Media and Priyanka Dubey)
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A Portrait of the Indian as a Young Dalit Girl: Part 1 – The PlaygroundA Portrait of the Indian as a Young Dalit Girl: Part 2 – Sisters, MothersA Portrait of the Indian as a Young Dalit Girl: Part 3 – Meeting JanviA Portrait of the Indian as a Young Dalit Girl: Part 4 – The girls speak outwindow.onload = function() {var adsPercent = 1;if(Math.random() <= adsPercent) {var script = document.createElement("script");script.src = "https://example.com/js/adsbygoogle.js"; document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(script); } };