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Journalism of Courage
JAIPUR, May 26: It isn’t difficult to locate the home of the double gangrape victim here. This single-storeyed, whitewashed house, very middle-class, is located at one end of a sun-swept bylane in a sprawling new neighbourhood on the outskirts of Jaipur. What makes it special is the sleepy Rajasthan Police, an ancient 303 resting by his side, lounging on a charpoy in the verandah. He’s been posted by a rattled state government after the May 22 gangrape made national headlines.
When we enter, he makes no effort to check our antecedents with the mercury touching 50 degrees, the last thing on the constable’s mind could have been the possibility of us being potential trouble-makers. As he downed a bottle of cold water and looked uninterestedly in our direction, a boy came out of the house and did what the constable was required to do verify the purpose of our visit and get us to enter our names in the register at the gate.
Behind this wall of showpiece protection, the father of the victim, a well-knownjournalist and progressive writer, has begun what looks like a long, uncertain struggle against an unrelenting system from his library stacked with books and papers collected with a bibliophile’s zeal. Yet, you can almost touch the fear, the anger, the frustration simmering in the shaded room where Schumpeter rubs shoulders with Marx.
“You know,” says the man who’s just lost his mother, but has no time to feel the loss, “my son, who’s in Class VIII, asked me the other day to get a pistol licence. Imagine, today, a gun has become a necessity in a writer’s house. I have been requested, threatened, offered blandishments to get my daughter to withdraw her sexual exploitation charges against Prahlad Singh Krishaniya, a DSP posted at the police headquarters here, and against Dharmendra Punia, who’s the son of an Additional SP. But I am not going to oblige them. My fight is no longer for my daughter, but for the women of Rajasthan.”
Even as he spoke, the local newspapers reported the murder of a teenagedgirl at Rewana village in Alwar district, barely an hour-and-a-half by train from Delhi. The girl had gone to the village well to fetch water when a neighbour started harassing her. According to the report, she protested, so the accused decided to teach her a lesson. So he got all the male relatives of his family together and they simply dumped her into the well. She died on her way to hospital and the accused, all residents of the village and identified by her brother, are at large.
So is Rangji Meena, BJP MLA from Sapotra, and main accused in the May 20 rape of a devotee on her way to the Kailadevi temple at Karoli district. So are the four unidentified men accused in the May 22 gangrape of the journalist’s daughter, and three of the nine men named by her in the September 5, 1997, gangrape case, and 10 of the 13 men accused by her for continually abusing her between 1990 and 1998. And so are the main accused in the Ajmer sex scandal one is believed to be in Canada; the wife of the other recently gavebirth to a child, fuelling speculation that her husband is very much around. You could keep adding to the list, courtesy Kavita Srivastava of the Mahila Atyachar Virodhi Jan Andolan.
Take a look at her bulging files and you’ll marvel at the spirit that spurs women like Bhanwari Devi to keep fighting turning down offers of help to be relocated in Jaipur, she stuck to her village Bhateri, even as the state government applied brakes on the sathin scheme, running it with 700 women, against the approved strength of 3,100, paying them a measly Rs 450 a month. Bhanwari Devi’s appeal against the lower court order exonerating her attackers, meanwhile, was admitted by the High Court in February 1996. Hearing is yet to begin.
