Hathras Horror: This is no country for women

Yesterday the whole day I felt paralysed. The horror of the Hathras rape case and its aftermath wasn’t sinking in. I am the kind of person who writes her outrage. Not yesterday though, I felt helpless and depressed.

Has anything changed since Nirbhaya case, since Kathua rape case, since the gang rape and murder of a veterinary doctor in Hyderabad? I guess not.

Can you imagine a more gruesome act than what happened with a 19-year-old Dalit girl. Imagine being gang raped, tongue cut off, strangulated, spine broken and left to die. No she wasn’t wearing shorts or a short dress; no, she was not out partying late; no, she was not unescorted, she was in Hathras, a rural region of UP with her mother in the fields, working, when she was grabbed from behind and dragged into the nearby fields.

But the horror doesn’t end there. She was taken to the hospital but with little or no treatment her condition deteriorated and so the authorities shifted her to a New Delhi hospital. But by then she had reached a point of no return. She died. The horror doesn’t end here too.

UP Police took her body back to her village but they went straight to the cremation ground and demanded permission for immediate cremation from the family. The family refused, so they locked up the family and hurriedly cremated the girl. We wouldn’t have known of this, had not a braveheart woman journalist Tanushree Pandey along with some other regional journalists video recorded all of this. But the nightmare continues with the leaders of the ruling party of the state first saying it’s fake news and then the UP police saying that she was not raped!

There are many questions here: why was she cremated in a hurry, what were the concerned authorities trying to wipe away? With mounting pressure from the tremendous outrage on social media, authorities have now decided to set up a SIT team. We have yet to see how independently they will probe the case.

A similar case in Balrampur

While sitting to write this last night I came across a report on Twitter of another horrific gang rape case of a Dalit girl, this time in Balrampur District of UP. This on the same day the Hathras tragedy was playing out. A 22-year-old Dalit woman died after allegedly being raped by two men. A written complaint was filed at the Gainsdi Police Station in which her family members said the woman had failed to return home. The victim later returned home in a rickshaw in the most horrible condition possible, with a glucose drip injection attached to her hand. The family members tried to take the woman to the hospital but she succumbed on the way. The family has named two boys in the written complaint and have alleged rape. The police acted immediately on the complaint and have arrested both the culprits.

The victim's mother alleged that her daughter was given an injection before being raped and that her waist and both legs had been broken after which she was sent home on a rickshaw.

Nightmares are made of these, when will it end?

The last report that I read was that this girl too was cremated within one hour of her death. And the police say that her legs and waist have not been broken. But how will we know for sure, now that the body has been cremated?

Caste at play

I read one Twitter post which pointed out that the Hathras case was nothing but casteist notion at play. The savarnas (upper caste) are showing aukaat to Dalits. Is it so? So brutal, so gruesome!

The fact that the four perpetrators were men from upper caste and the girl was from the Dalit community itself shows that it was actually caste at play.

In a country where Dalit bridegrooms are not allowed to ride a mare to their weddings, members of the Dalit communities are not allowed entry to most places of worship, not allowed access to public places like a cremation ground, they are not allowed to be a part of social or cultural processions, including jatras-- tells us how deep rooted casteism is in our country.

If one wants to understand caste politics than one needs to watch an important and beautifully crafted film Article 15 to understand this equation, it loosely showcases the Badaun hangings to the Una floggings and beyond. The film draws its title from Article 15 of the Indian Constitution that forbids discrimination against any citizen on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth. It is set in a village in Uttar Pradesh where the IPS officer Ayan Ranjan (Ayushmann Khurrana) is posted.

Through Ayan we (at least I was as I was equally ignorant about real casteism at play especially in interiors of India), get to know about the country’s exploitative, congenitally assigned social divisioning beyond what he has learnt in theory in classrooms. What further causes Ayan to attempt a study of caste is the rape and murder of two Dalit girls whose bodies are found hanging from a tree soon after his arrival in the village. Not unlike the Hathras case but the difference being that the girl’s body was hurriedly cremated in Hathras and in the movie they were hung from a tree.

The state machinery which includes the Police force becomes a silent spectator and hence can be considered approvers as the police personnel themselves are deeply caste ridden, at least the movie shows that. The rapes, the killings are a warning for the marginalised communities to live within their bounds that the society has decided for them.

Dalit women worst hit

The easiest way to cower down a man, family, or community is to target their women. This has been the case since time immemorial. Has it changed in 2020? No.

Dalit women have always been subjugated to violence even rape and murder by the state actors and powerful members of higher castes who use it to inflict political lessons and crush dissent within the community.

Research shows how Dalit women are the worst sufferers of a systemic failure to probe caste crimes. They are known to face double discrimination as they become the target for upper caste men outside homes and gender-based violence at home.

The status quo is not going to change anytime soon that’s for sure. It will not change till the society rids itself of casteism and a patriarchal mind-set. Also, the fact remains that the Indian justice system cannot serve as a deterrent for crime when there is no consequence for the perpetrators of violence against Dalit women. The whole state machinery needs to come together to get rid of this menace. But is the state ready to?