Enrico Fabian for The New York Times
A 16-year-old girl who was gang-raped, sitting with her mother. The girl’s father killed himself.
One after the other, the men raped her. They had dragged the girl into a
darkened stone shelter at the edge of the fields, eight men, maybe more,
reeking of pesticide and cheap whiskey. They assaulted her for nearly three
hours. She was 16 years old.
When it was over, the men threatened to kill her if she told anyone, and
for days the girl said nothing. Speaking out would have been difficult, anyway,
given the hierarchy of caste. She was poor and a Dalit, the low-caste group
once known as untouchables, while most of the attackers were from a higher
caste that dominated land and power in the village. It might have ended there,
if not for the videos: her assailants had taken cellphone videos as trophies,
and the images began circulating among village men until one was shown to the
victim’s father, his family said.
Distraught, the father committed suicide on Sept. 18 by drinking
pesticide. Infuriated, Dalits demanded justice in the rape case. “We thought,
We lost my husband, we lost our honor,” the mother of the rape victim said.
“What is the point of remaining silent now?” As in many countries, silence
often follows rape in India, especially in villages, where a rape victim is
usually regarded as a shamed woman, unfit for marriage. But an outcry over a
string of recent rapes, including this one, in the northern state of Haryana,
has shattered that silence, focusing national attention on India’s rising
number of sexual assaults while also exposing the conservative, male-dominated
power structure in Haryana, where rape victims are often treated with callous
disregard.
In a rapidly changing country, rape cases have increased at an alarming
rate, roughly 25 percent in six years. To some degree, this reflects a rise in
reporting by victims. But India’s changing gender dynamic is also a significant
factor, as more females are attending school, entering the work force or
choosing their own spouses — trends that some men regard as a threat.
India’s news media regularly carry horrific accounts of gang rapes,
attacks once rarely seen. Sometimes, gangs of young men stumble upon a young
couple — in some cases the couple is meeting furtively in a conservative
society — and then rape the woman. Analysts also point to demographic trends:
India has a glut of young males, some unemployed, abusing alcohol or drugs and
unnerved by the new visibility of women in society. “This visibility is seen as
a threat and a challenge,” said Ranjana Kumari, who runs the Center for Social
Research in New Delhi.
In Haryana, the initial response to the rape after it was disclosed
ranged from denial to denouncing the media to blaming the victim. A spokesman
for the governing Congress Party was quoted as saying that 90 percent of rape
cases begin as consensual sex. Women’s groups were outraged after a village
leader pointed to teenage girls’ sexual desire as the reason for the rapes. “I
think that girls should be married at the age of 16, so that they have their
husbands for their sexual needs, and they don’t need to go elsewhere,” the
village leader, Sube Singh, told IBN Live, a news channel. “This way rapes will
not occur.”
The most vulnerable women are poor Dalits, the lowest tier of the social
structure. Of 19 recent rape cases in Haryana, at least six victims were
Dalits. One Dalit teenager in Haryana committed suicide, setting herself afire,
after being gang-raped. Another Dalit girl, 15, who was mentally handicapped,
was raped in Rohtak, according to Indian news media accounts, the same district
where a 13-year-old girl was allegedly raped by a neighbor. “If you are a poor
woman who is raped, you cannot even imagine a life where there will be
justice,” Kalpana Sharma, a columnist, wrote recently in The Hindu, a national
English-language newspaper. “If you are a poor woman and a Dalit, then the
chances of justice are even slimmer.”
Haryana is one of India’s most entrenched bastions of feudal patriarchy.
The social preference for sons has contributed to a problem of some couples
aborting female fetuses, leaving Haryana with the most skewed gender ratio in
India, 861 females for every 1,000 males. Politically, the upper Jat caste
largely controls a statewide network of unelected, all-male councils known as
khap panchayats, which dominate many rural regions of the state.
Elected leaders are reluctant to confront the khaps, given their ability
to turn out voters, and often endorse their conservative social agenda, in
which women are subservient to men. Khaps have sought to ban women from wearing
bluejeans or using cellphones. One khap member, Jitender Chhatar, blamed fast
food for the rise in rape cases, arguing that it caused hormonal imbalances and
sexual urges in young women. Mr. Singh, who suggested lowering the legal
marriage age, is also a khap leader. “They are working the blame-the-victim
theory,” said Jagmati Sangwan, president of the Haryana chapter of the
All-India Democratic Women’s Association. “They are diverting attention from
the crime and the criminals, and the root causes.”
Yet public anger is clearly bubbling up. Small protests have been staged
across the state, including one this month in the town of Meham, where about
100 men and women picketed the district police headquarters over the rape of a
17-year-old girl. They waved signs demanding “Arrest Rapists!” and “Justice for
Women” and chanted “Down with Haryana Police!” Here in Dabra, about 100 miles
from the Pakistan border, villagers say there is no khap panchayat but rather
an elected village council where the leadership position, known as sarpanch, is
reserved for a woman under nationwide affirmative action policies. Yet the
male-dominated ethos prevails. The current sarpanch is the wife of a local Jat
leader, who put her forward to circumvent the restriction. During an interview
with the husband, the official sarpanch sat silently in the doorway, her face
covered by a gauzy scarf. “No, no,” she answered when asked to comment, as she
pointed to her husband. “He’s the sarpanch. What’s the point in talking to me?”
The gang-rape of the 16-year-old girl occurred on Sept. 9 but remained a
secret in the village until her father’s suicide. Dalits formed a committee to
demand justice, and roughly 400 people demonstrated outside the district police
headquarters, as well as at the hospital where the father’s body was being
kept. “We told them that unless you catch the suspects, we would not take the
body,” said a woman named Maya Devi. “We do not have land. We do not have
money. What we have is honor. If your honor is gone, you have nothing.”
Since then, the police have arrested eight men — seven of them Jats —
who have confessed to the attack. There are discrepancies; the victim says she
was abducted outside the village, while the suspects say they attacked her
after catching her having a tryst with a married man. “She was raped against
her will,” said B. Satheesh Balan, the district superintendent of police.
“There is no doubt.”
Officer Balan said villagers told the police that other local girls had
also been gang-raped at the same stone shelter, though no evidence was
available. Often, a girl’s family will hide a rape rather than be stigmatized
in the village. Even sympathizers of the teenage victim doubt she can
assimilate back into Dabra. “It will be difficult on her,” Ms. Devi said. “Now
she is branded.” In an interview at her grandparents’ home outside the village,
the victim said she believed other suspects remained at large, leaving her at
risk. (Female police officers have been posted at the house round-the-clock.)
Yet she has actively pushed the police and joined in the protests, despite the
warnings by her attackers. “They threatened me and said they would kill my
family if I told anyone,” she said.
Many Dalit girls drop out of school, but the victim was finishing high
school. Even in the aftermath of the rape, she took her first-term exams in
economics, history and Sanskrit. But she no longer wants to return to the
village school and is uncertain about her future. “Earlier, I had lots of
dreams,” she said. “Now I’m not sure I’ll be able to fulfill them. My father
wanted me to become a doctor. Now I don’t think I’ll be able to do it.”
NY Times
Please share
No comments:
Post a Comment