Finding Zaheera Sheikh

Exactly four years and eight days ago, on March 1, 2002, a slim 17-year-old girl and her family were hounded by a riotous mob baying for blo...

Exactly four years and eight days ago, on March 1, 2002, a slim 17-year-old girl and her family were hounded by a riotous mob baying for blood at Best Bakery in Hanuman Tekri, Vadodara. Today, it is the Vadodara police which is 8220;officially8221; hunting the same girl, after the Supreme Court on Wednesday sentenced Zaheera Sheikh to one-year 8217;s simple imprisonment and a Rs 50,000 fine for being a 8220;self-condemned liar8221;.

This is a story of irony and tragedy, in which Zaheera became an unwitting heroine and also a victim. Tragic, because it was this gutsy chit of a girl, who, when uncorrupted, could rise to the occasion as no other, filing an FIR against the rioters and standing by her family. Ironical, because this young girl grew into a young woman who learnt fast the lessons of profit, media management, political pulls and pressures, and succumbed to them.

But it in no way takes away the truth of what happened on March 2, 2002 at SSG Hospital, Vadodara. The 17-year-old girl, with her two plaits undone and turmeric poultice on her bleeding head, her salwar-kameez blood-stained, stood out from the rest in the hospital8217;s casualty ward. Even as the bodies were counted 8212; more than a dozen 8212; a stunned, dumbstruck mother, aunt and younger brother Nasibullah with bleeding feet sat on the floor, she had negotiated, cajoled and pleaded with doctors and police officials to take care of the injured and the dead.

The girl who came to Vadodara with her baker father and four other siblings, had since traversed a great distance 8212; from relief camps to national attention. Thereafter, nattily dressed in a burqa, it is this younger sibling who remains the self-appointed spokesperson of the family which witnessed 14 deaths, in every police station to numerous courts and commissions. A secondary-school dropout, she is the one who remained the public face, even as elder brother Nafitullah married twice, mother Sehrunnisa fell out with relatives over the compensation money, and her younger brother squandered away the future, as the family realised the political and financial importance of their testimony.

Caught in the crossfire of a compliant Gujarat political system and activists, perhaps the only crime that Zaheera and her family committed 8212; more so, as she was under the strong influence of her domineering widowed mother Sehrunnisa 8212; was the centuries8217; old one: plain greed. Sensing the national importance of the issue while she was with human rights activist Teesta Setalvad in Mumbai, where she became privy to the attention of the national media and the ways of a metropolis for the first time, hers has been a story of growing greed and need, remaining vulnerable to be exploited.

She, who always had a family entourage, and was excommunicated and abused by the Muslim community, could live in the best of the hotels, guest-houses and farmhouses dotted around Gujarat, always under the protection of Gujarat police which suddenly turned helpful after her volte-face. It is perhaps also a story of expediency, for on Wednesday, when the Supreme Court read out her sentence, the very police which was supposed to be protecting her and the lawyers who were paying her every bill, publicly disowned her.

The police is hunting for her, and her latest set of lawyers plead ignorance. Somewhere, they say, Zaheera grieves over her elder brother.

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No one knows what she is thinking and going through since November 3, 2004 8212;the last time she faced the media after slipping into the shadow of gun-toting security commandoes.

Hunted and hounded, Zaheera remains the unwitting victim of political caprice and personal greed.