Threats continue to hound rape victim

Bowing to pressure, Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat had promised to set up a judicial inquiry into the suicide. Deputy Superintendent of Police Dhirendra Kumar Kinchi was transferred after he took Vijay in for interrogation on the basis of Ila’s police complaint, while Superintendent of Police Hemant Priyadarshi was suspended after the suicide. The latter has since been reinstated. The muni had apparently committed suicide by slashing his wrists and drinking acid.

An independent woman’s team demanded an inquiry into the suicide case and the final report of the post-rape investigations. Community members informed the team that it was not the practice to keep acid in the premises of a religious place nor could it be used for cleaning as it could kill insects and bacteria, which is against the tenets of the religion.

However, today Ila may be days and miles away from the incident, but it continues to haunt her. She does not leave home without police security, which was granted to her after she returned to Mumbai, to escape the community’s wrath. Ila’s son was the disciple of Lokendra Vijay, and she was in Bheemal in September to participate in his upashray. On the day of the event she wanted the boy to meet his grandmother, who was put up at a nearby dharmasala, before the pravachan. Having sought permission of the muni, she went up to her son’s quarters, situated a floor above his guru’s. On reaching there she found the place deserted, but for the muni’s presence.

Following this, he raped her, threatening, "your son is with me, so don’t tell your parents anything". When a distraught Ila left the room, she met the muni’s nephew, also a disciple, who warned her against making the case public "as a religious honour was at stake". When she tried to tell her parents at the dharmasala, Lokendra’s servant arrived there with summons for her father from the muni, and gestured her to be silent.

“I was then summoned to the muni’s room, where his brother, sister, both part of the ashram, and my father, told me that they were sorry about what happened, and that I should dismiss all of it as a bad dream,” she says. She was also asked not to speak about this to her husband before two months, by when the chaturmas would end, a period considered auspicious by the Jains. Ila refused to comply, and registered a police complaint. Community members have accused her of `crying rape’ for a sum of Rs 5 lakh.

Even after coming to Mumbai, she was summoned by a Jain businessman to his Pedder Road residence and was told, “If one out of 5,000 munis turns out to be bad, don’t malign the entire community. Don’t spoil the name of the Jain religion.”

“Who wants to bring the religion down? All I want is justice for the injustice that has happened to me. If I don’t get justice with evidences overwhelmingly in my favour, all those women who suffer similar injustice will never speak up," says Ila.