(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 outA Portrait of the Indian as a Young Dalit Girl: Part 5 – Janvi’s LawyerBy Priyanka Dubey
In Jat-dominated part of Bhagana village, I meet sarpanch Rakesh Panghal. A clean cement road that runs past many big houses of influential Jats leads to Panghal’s double-storeyed home in the best part of the village. I am made to sit in a small outer room of the house, where the sarpanch is sitting with an elderly family member, who is reading a newspaper and smoking a hookah. Panghal himself is in his late thirties, and when I meet him, he is wearing a golden and cream kurta and white pajamas, constantly answering calls and checking his smartphone.
As I enter his house, he says he’s already heard information that a journalist had entered the Dalit tola. He instructs me to switch off my tape recorder and refuses to be photographed. “If you still want a picture, I will send you a good one on WhatsApp. I am not looking nice right now.”
Categorically denying all allegations about his involvement in the gang-rape of the four Dalit girls, he says, “They are absolutely lying because they want to frame us so that they can get money from the government for free. Don’t you know that the girls got compensation of Rs 1.2 lakh each from the government? Now, I will tell you what actually happened. On that night, these girls fed their parents sedatives and then came out of their homes at around 11 pm. The eldest one, Meena, was having an affair with Sumit. So she called him and told him that all four of them have come out and that he should come to pick them up.”
“Sumit, being a sanskari boy, said no. They again called and kept on pleading with him. He was concerned about the girls as it was around midnight by now. So he took out his motorcycle and walked with it for a kilometer so that he didn’t wake his family. He went to the girls, made them sit on his motorbike and took them to nearby fields. Then he kept on trying to convince the girls to go back home. But they wouldn’t listen. Then two of his friends who were returning from a wedding joined them. Sumit asked them to drop the girls to the railway station and he came back home quietly. After that, the whole night he kept on calling the girls and asking them to come back home. But they had boarded the train to Bhatinda on their own. And they are doing all this drama. But I am sure that we will win in the court, you just see. We have already got (one of the accused) out on bail since he is a juvenile. All the other boys will also come out very soon, you just see,” he says.
In Bhagana’s Dalit tola, I meet Sheela, Meena’s mother. She has just returned from the wedding in her family and is soon leaving again to join the other survivors and their families at Jantar Mantar. Her daughter is, according to the authorities, the only victim, but just barely, given that the police are now pushing the consensual theory.
I mention the call details present in the charge sheet to Sheela and ask her if her daughter had a phone. She says, “No, none of them ever had any phone. In fact, the girls told us that the accused had left a phone in Meena’s clothes. She found that phone with her when she woke up on the Bhatinda railway station. Later that night, Rakesh Panghal and Virendra threatened the girls on their way back to Bhagana. The sarpanch said that if they dared to complain and take the name of any Jat, then he would kill them and destroy all of us. He knew about the phone and immediately snatched it away from the girls. Now, the phone is all a drama to distract the case and an attempt to malign my daughters. They all want to save the accused. Because they are Jats and the police and lawyers and judges … all are upper-caste people. Sometimes, I feel so hopeless and I feel that we will never get justice.”
Janvi as Dhanuk, Janvi as Jat
It’s a humid mid-July afternoon and the day-off bell has just rung at the primary government school of Bhagana where Janvi and all other girls of the village study. Small girls dressed in green cotton salwars and checked green kurtas are running toward their homes. Inside the building of the Government Primary and Middle School, Bhagana, Hisar, I meet senior teacher Anita Banda, who travels from Hisar town every day to teach in this school of 250 children. She remembers Janvi, Sushma, Leela and Meena. She says, “They were all decent in studies but it would be an overstatement to say that if given a chance to study further, they could bring revolutionary changes in their own lives. The reason is that they are already groomed and conditioned in a way to accept subjugation and violence as a part of their lives.”
I think of the four girls and their clan sitting on the street in Delhi, and I feel that Anita is wrong. The girls and their families are not the ones conditioned to accept violence. It’s the ‘upper’-caste families that believe that Dalit families will accept violence forever.
Banda continues, “The lives of lower-caste girls follow a pattern here which is very difficult to break. Men are usually drunk and useless. Mothers work on the field and these young girls have to cook and do all household work from a very young age. And as soon as they reach Class 5, their parents start pulling them out of schools to marry them off. I personally beg many mothers to let their daughters study at least until Class 10, but lower-caste women rarely agree. They are too scared to let their daughters come to school every day. And I can completely understand their fear. I myself face harassment on my way back to home, what assurance can I give these mothers?”
Sushma’s mother Reshma told me another day, “Jat boys tease our girls day and night. We can’t let them step out of our homes. We can’t send them to school once they start growing up. Schoolteachers say that they are responsible for the safety of girls only inside the school building and if something happens to our girls on their way home, they can’t help it. Jat boys hover around the school gates, chase and molest Dalit girls on their way back from school. So nobody in our families wants girls to go to school. Daughters of Dalits are the easiest targets for Jat boys. And since the courts, police, government and administration … everything is on their side, we prefer to keep our girls inside our homes. You say that we should keep our fight going, but you tell me, who helped us? We are sitting at Jantar Mantar, just one more forgotten story. I don’t have any hope for justice now.”
At Jantar Mantar on one of my visits, I meet Janvi, Bagoriya’s 18-year-old daughter. She is the first Dalit girl in the village to go to a Delhi college. She is wearing a purple salwar kameez made of cotton, and her oiled hair is woven into tight, long braids. But strikingly, unlike all other girls in the camp, her head is not covered with her dupptta, which lies on her shoulders. She remembers what it was like to study at the government school in Bhagana. “How will you study if your classmates and most teachers call you by shouting out your caste name and then your father’s name? The environment at schools in Bhagana is exceptionally hostile for lower-caste girls. For example, when I started getting good marks, teachers started humiliating me and students started abusing me verbally. One teacher always gave me less marks to ensure that a lower-caste girl did not end up coming first in a class full of Jat children.”
What are Jat girls like, I ask Janvi. She says, “Jat girls can do anything. They can go to school without fear; they can play on the playground and roam around the village freely. Most of them study in the village’s private school because Jats are rich. This private school also had a special sports teacher for girls! At times, I have also seen a few Jat girls wearing shirt-pant in our village while I have to ensure that the dupatta never falls off my head.
They also put dupattas on their heads, but they can wear other outfits too. Jat girls even go out for studies. Most of them go to college in Hisar and even in Delhi while I have to struggle even to continue my Class 5 education.”
“And the biggest difference is that Jat girls are respected in the village. The same Jat boys who molest us every day cannot dare to tease or molest Jat girls. My mother always says this disparity is because Jat men believe that Dalit girls are born to serve them and they have every right to molest and rape us.”
*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 outA Portrait of the Indian as a Young Dalit Girl: Part 5 – Janvi’s Lawyerwindow.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); } };