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Summary: Following the girl's rape, the suggestion that the age of marriage
should be be lowered to reduce rapes, sparked both a wave of
anger and a debate about India’s attitudes towards women.
[5 November 2012] - For a full ten days after she was abducted and raped by a group of
men, the teenager told no-one, terrified by the men’s threats
and their claim that they would distribute photographs they had
taken during the attack. When she did eventually tell her mother,
things got even worse; her father, a gardener, unable to bear the
trauma of what had happened to his daughter and the indignity of such
photographs being passed around, swallowed pesticide.
In the following days, police arrested and charged seven men, all
members of a higher caste. But the response to what took place by
certain elements of society – a suggestion that the age of marriage
should be be lowered to reduce rapes, and that such attacks were
triggered by eating ‘Western’ fast-food – sparked both a wave of
anger and a debate about India’s attitudes towards women that has
gripped the country
. Today, the 16-year-old sits with her hands quietly folded on the edge
of a bed in a relative’s house, reaching for courage amid this
bewildering storm. She says she is determined to obtain justice. “It’s
not just about me. Things have been happening in other villages,” she
said.
The story of the attack on the teenager is one that exposes many of
the often-overlapping faultlines within India’s still predominantly
rural society. The young woman’s family are Dalits, traditionally
located at the very bottom of Hindu society where they suffer
widespread discrimination. In the girl’s village, Dabra, located 10
miles from Hisar in the state of Haryana, most of her extended family
and neighbours worked as landless labourers.
Her alleged attackers, by contrast, were Jats, a higher caste that is
common in many north Indian states and are often land-owners. In
Dabra, said the senior village official, all the land is owned by
Jats.
Campaigners say Dalits often suffer violent assault and that Dalit
women are the most vulnerable. They claim the situation is
particularly bad in rural Haryana, relatively prosperous and located
close to the national capital, but where strict patriarchal and
conservative attitudes often clash with demands for change. The state
has the country’s worst gender ratio, with just 830 girls for 1,000
boys because of the illegal but widespread use of pre-natal sex
selection and female foeticide.
The attitudes were revealed, say campaigners, by the response of many of those from
Haryana to the rape of the young woman from Dabra and other similar
cases, highlighted by the subsequent media attention. One local leader, Jitender Chhatar, a member of a so-called khap
panchyatt, or unelected village council claimed: “Consumption of fast
food contributes to such incidents. Chowmein leads to hormonal
imbalance, evoking an urge to indulge in such acts. You also know the
impact of chowmein, which is a spicy food, on our body.”
Meanwhile, the state’s former chief minister, Om Prakash Chautala, of
the Indian National Lok Dal, an ally of the main national
opposition, told local media he supported another
recommendation from a khap panchyatt which claimed lowering the
marriage age to 15 would also reduce the number of rapes. “In the past,
especially in Mughal era, people used to marry their daughters early
to save them from such atrocities. Currently a situation of similar
kind is arising in Haryana,” he said.
The village of Dabra is made of narrow alleyways, where farm animals
are tethered and open-drains run along the sides of the tracks. The
Jat area, with its cement roads and large houses is noticeably
wealthier then the cluster of Dalit streets. “There is a difference in
everything – electricity supply, water, the streets, the entire
infrastructure,” said the young woman.
While she and her family have moved to the house of an aunt in
Hisar, an uneasy calm hangs about her village. Few people are keen to
speak about the situation. A policeman sits on guard outside the
family home. “The police have been here ever since this happened,”
said one middle-aged Dalit woman, Chameli, who said she was a cousin
of the teenager’s father. “The Jats have been
saying things like ‘You have done this to our community, you have
betrayed us. Do not enter out fields’.”
The young woman from Dabra harboured ambitions to become the first
member of her family to attend college. She has been studying
economics, Sanskrit and history. Yet despite her ambitions – or
perhaps because of them - she found herself rebuffed by those who did
not want to see either Dalits or women progress in society.
Many in the community considered her family “untouchable” and would
not share food, drinking water or even utensils with them. “On
Tuesdays [a day associated with worship of the god Hanuman], they
would not sell milk to us,” she added, dressed in a white and yellow,
traditional long-sleeved shirt.
The elected head villager, a woman called Maya Devi whose husband’s
name, and not her’s, appears on the council’s office building, denied
claims from the teenager’s family that pressure had been exerted to
try and make them drop the case, including the offer of payments.
“The fact is they have got people,” she said. “The case has been
filed with the police. There is no way it cannot go to court.”
Media reports quoting figures from the National Crime Records Bureau
suggest that the number of reported rapes in Haryana increased
from 386 in 2004 to 733 in 2011. There is a conviction rate of 13 per
cent. In the month since the attack in Dabra on September 9, the media
has reported at least a dozen rapes, many of them gang-rapes. In one
incident in the town of Jind, a 16-year-old Dalit girl set herself on fire after being assaulted. “I criticise in the strongest
terms these kind of incidents. The guilty should get the severest
punishment,” Sonia Gandhi, president of the ruling Congress party,
said when she visited the family.
Yet campaigners say cases are routinely settled before they reach the
courts. “The laws are there on paper but on the ground there is
impunity,” said Asha Kotwal, of the National Campaign on Dalit Human
Rights. “There has to be stringent implementation of laws – that will
give a strong message that these things cannot happen.”
In the Dabra case, the local police, many of whom are members of the
Jat community, have been accused of inaction. The
family of the girl said the police declined to file
charges until relatives refused to take the father’s body home from
the mortuary for cremation. Several of those eventually arrested came
from families of local politicians.
The Superintendent of police for Hisar, Satheesh Balan, said the young
woman did not come forward for ten days and that details of her
statement changed. He said there had been a 15 per cent reduction
in reported rapes in Haryana but said his own district had seen a
slight increase. Last year, there were 38 rapes of which 28 involved
people of the same caste.
Having questioned the accused, he said he did not believe the attack
was a caste-related crime. “When they committed the crime, they did
not know the caste of the girl,” he said.
Meanwhile, the young woman is somehow trying to think of
the future. She has enrolled in a new school and in recent days began classes. “The community has already
forwarded demands to the government,” she added. “One is that I be
given a job so I can manage for myself.”
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