The country had long turned in for the night; it was 2.30 in the morning. For one family, it was the darkest night. In the nondescript village of Hathras, in the sprawling state of Uttar Pradesh the body of a nineteen-year-old gang-rape victim was being forcibly consigned to flames by the state’s dubious police force. The girl’s family was nowhere to be seen - they had been locked in by the police. The parent’s pleas to be allowed to cremate their child themselves had been dismissed; in Hindu customs a funeral does not take place after sunset. The lower caste family could not even pay their last respects, let alone have a final say. There was no dignity for the victim even in death.
The cremation fire raged outside in the fields, and something died within us. Again.
Hathras is a small village that was never on anyone’s map till the day four Thakurs or upper caste men raped the Dalit - as the lower caste is called - girl in a field when she had gone to collect animal fodder. The victim’s family are the ‘untouchables’ and despite celebrating our 74th Independence Day, the upper castes still admit to practicing untouchability in that village. And now, in a totalitarian milieu where even the Minister of Women and Child Development Smriti Irani - usually one of the most vocal BJP ministers - has remained quiet, rallies are being taken out in support of the upper-caste perpetrators. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is himself a Thakur.
In a society that is as fractured as we are today, there is no justification needed or given for many things. It is no longer about the right and wrong, the majority does the convincing, whether it is the media or the politician.
Despite being brought to the police station bleeding from the mouth, her tongue cut and a paralysing spinal injury, it took 10 days for even an FIR to be filed and two weeks for the victim who was already in a critical state to get proper medical care. Before she passed, the victim declared several times that she had been raped. State administration now denies any rape.
For her family sobbing with grief, this is only the beginning. The District Magistrate urged them to change their stance, they refused. Finally, the Yogi government hired a Mumbai based PR firm - its brief to tell the foreign media that there was no assault. The narrative in Yogi’s rajya changed even more, an ‘international plot’ was behind the caste turmoil in the state. Such is the importance of caste even today that an innocent and poor family is merely collateral damage. They are not the first, they will not be the last.
While we were witnessing the horror of Hathras, barely days later in another village also in the state of Uttar Pradesh, a college student - another Dalit - was raped on her way back home from college admissions. She was reportedly tortured even after the rape and sent home in a rickshaw. The victim died on her way to the hospital.
In 2018, India topped the list of the world’s most dangerous country for women - crimes against women have risen by 86 percent in the last decade. The families of the two girls who lost their lives are at the lowest rung of a patriarchal society where the role of caste- based violence is more than a whisper. Many Dalit families do not report a crime simply because of fear of the powerful Thakurs, the statistics that we know are frightening enough. As per the latest National Crime Record Bureau’s data, 10 Dalit women are raped in India daily. For a country that promises to embrace the digital and bullet trains, the shackles of centuries old caste dynamics are still flourishing.
In politics, perhaps it pays to keep the poor impoverished and the Dalit, untouchable.
Will these two girls and their families from a state with the highest rate of crime get justice? In 2012, Jyoti or Nirbhaya’s gang-rape in a moving bus shook us from our collective ennui. Yet, her attackers were punished only in 2020. It took eight years for the wheels of justice to move in one of the most prominent cases the country has ever seen and Jyoti’s family is perhaps a minority that was given a closure, NCRB data shows that only 25.5 percent of rape cases end in conviction.
With 3.7 million cases pending across High Courts and District Courts for the last ten years, for so many it is too little, too late. Nor can a daily wage earner from Hathras afford to make endless rounds of courtrooms. Forget reaching a court of justice, can these two Dalit families even afford to push back? The systemic misogyny that targets the marginalised is even one notch below the other vulnerable, women and girls. The difference is in how a victim was cremated.
Despite Covid-19, the civil society came out in numbers to protest. Will this be the turning point, or will our candles burn out long before their story will? In our country #BlackLivesMatter had more resonance than #DalitLivesMatter.
The writer is an author and journalist based in India
The cremation fire raged outside in the fields, and something died within us. Again.
Hathras is a small village that was never on anyone’s map till the day four Thakurs or upper caste men raped the Dalit - as the lower caste is called - girl in a field when she had gone to collect animal fodder. The victim’s family are the ‘untouchables’ and despite celebrating our 74th Independence Day, the upper castes still admit to practicing untouchability in that village. And now, in a totalitarian milieu where even the Minister of Women and Child Development Smriti Irani - usually one of the most vocal BJP ministers - has remained quiet, rallies are being taken out in support of the upper-caste perpetrators. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is himself a Thakur.
In a society that is as fractured as we are today, there is no justification needed or given for many things. It is no longer about the right and wrong, the majority does the convincing, whether it is the media or the politician.
Despite being brought to the police station bleeding from the mouth, her tongue cut and a paralysing spinal injury, it took 10 days for even an FIR to be filed and two weeks for the victim who was already in a critical state to get proper medical care. Before she passed, the victim declared several times that she had been raped. State administration now denies any rape.
For her family sobbing with grief, this is only the beginning. The District Magistrate urged them to change their stance, they refused. Finally, the Yogi government hired a Mumbai based PR firm - its brief to tell the foreign media that there was no assault. The narrative in Yogi’s rajya changed even more, an ‘international plot’ was behind the caste turmoil in the state. Such is the importance of caste even today that an innocent and poor family is merely collateral damage. They are not the first, they will not be the last.
In 2018, India topped the list of the world’s most dangerous country for women - crimes against women have risen by 86 percent in the last decade
While we were witnessing the horror of Hathras, barely days later in another village also in the state of Uttar Pradesh, a college student - another Dalit - was raped on her way back home from college admissions. She was reportedly tortured even after the rape and sent home in a rickshaw. The victim died on her way to the hospital.
In 2018, India topped the list of the world’s most dangerous country for women - crimes against women have risen by 86 percent in the last decade. The families of the two girls who lost their lives are at the lowest rung of a patriarchal society where the role of caste- based violence is more than a whisper. Many Dalit families do not report a crime simply because of fear of the powerful Thakurs, the statistics that we know are frightening enough. As per the latest National Crime Record Bureau’s data, 10 Dalit women are raped in India daily. For a country that promises to embrace the digital and bullet trains, the shackles of centuries old caste dynamics are still flourishing.
In politics, perhaps it pays to keep the poor impoverished and the Dalit, untouchable.
Will these two girls and their families from a state with the highest rate of crime get justice? In 2012, Jyoti or Nirbhaya’s gang-rape in a moving bus shook us from our collective ennui. Yet, her attackers were punished only in 2020. It took eight years for the wheels of justice to move in one of the most prominent cases the country has ever seen and Jyoti’s family is perhaps a minority that was given a closure, NCRB data shows that only 25.5 percent of rape cases end in conviction.
With 3.7 million cases pending across High Courts and District Courts for the last ten years, for so many it is too little, too late. Nor can a daily wage earner from Hathras afford to make endless rounds of courtrooms. Forget reaching a court of justice, can these two Dalit families even afford to push back? The systemic misogyny that targets the marginalised is even one notch below the other vulnerable, women and girls. The difference is in how a victim was cremated.
Despite Covid-19, the civil society came out in numbers to protest. Will this be the turning point, or will our candles burn out long before their story will? In our country #BlackLivesMatter had more resonance than #DalitLivesMatter.
The writer is an author and journalist based in India