The fate of rape victims

The Supreme Court gave an outstanding judgement when it struck down the remission granted to 11 men convicted of rape and murder in the Bilkis Bano case, in which Bano was gangraped and several of her family members were murdered. 

But the judgement cannot take away from the fact that the hapless Bilkis Bano has spent the last 22 years fighting for justice. When the judicial magistrate ordered the closure of her case in 2003, she took the aid of the National Human Rights Commission to approach the Supreme Court, which had the case transferred to the CBI for investigation and to a special court in Maharashtra, and not in Gujarat, for the trial. Gujarat, therefore, did not have jurisdiction in the case to grant remission to the 11 convicted of the most barbaric crimes, as the top court ruled.

Even now, on January 8, the day the Supreme Court had to deliver its verdict, Bano and her family had to move from their residence to an unknown destination because of apprehensions about her safety. A similar apprehension is being faced by a B.Tech student studying at the IIT-Benares Hindu University, who was allegedly gangraped at gunpoint by three men in the early hours of November 2, 2023, inside the university campus.

Two of the alleged rapists were heading the BJP IT Cell in Varanasi while the third was a personal aide to the BJP zonal president of Varanasi. They stripped her, took a video of her to blackmail her, and then proceeded to rape her. Though the police knew the identity of the trio, they took a week to file an FIR and then too first filed it under Section 354, for use of criminal force against a woman with the intent to outrage her modesty.

Taking matters into her own hands, the victim showed tremendous courage in appearing in person before a local magistrate on November 8 to recount what had happened. The magistrate’s order forced the police to add the charge of gangrape in the FIR.

Pressure by the student community forced the police to finally arrest the men on December 31, but instead of putting them in police remand, where they would have been subject to police questioning, they have been put in judicial custody. The rape victim remains in hiding, having received no protection from the police.

Survivors of rape and their families have to struggle with the criminal justice system. The conviction rate in these cases remains abysmally low. In a majority of cases, the rapists go scot-free, while the victim and her family are ostracised by their community.

The result, as NCRB data shows, is that we are witnessing an alarming increase in rape case. In Rajasthan, for instance, there has been a 20% rise in rape cases since 2020, with many of the victims being minors, even girls as young as six. 

Justice has eluded the victims in most cases. Take the case of Bhanwari Devi, a Dalit in Bhateri village, 30 miles from Jaipur, who was doing advocacy with fellow villagers on the need to stop child marriage. She tried to persuade a Gujjar family from getting their nine-month-old baby daughter married off. The Gujjars are a ‘higher caste’ and five members of this caste attacked Devi and her husband on September 22, 1992, and three of them proceeded to rape her.

The police refused to take her complaint seriously and conducted her medical exam 52 hours after the rape had occurred. Her scratches and bruises were not recorded. The lack of evidence went against her. In 1995, reflecting the overall sentiment against ‘low caste’ Hindus, a High Court judge dismissed her case stating that because of reasons of purity, ‘high caste’
men would not deign to rape a lower caste woman.

The two cousins, 14 and 15 years of age, who were raped and murdered and then hanged from a mango tree on May 27, 2014, also were Dalits. Despite a national uproar, the CBI team brought in to investigate allowed the upper caste suspects to walk away scot-free.

The CBI team had in their report claimed that the polygraph tests of the five accused “showed no deception” while the families of the girls had “showed deception” and therefore allowed the ‘upper caste’ perpetrators of this crime to go scot-free.

The Hathras rape case also shocked the conscience of the nation. On September 29, 2020, a 19-year old Dalit girl died two weeks after she was gangraped by four ‘upper caste’ men who were her neighbours. She was left in the sugarcane fields in a critical condition, with a broken spine, a deep gash in her tongue leaving her unable to speak more than a few words as she lay dying. The four men belonged to the dominant Thakur community who own 50% of the land in UP, and where a large number of police officers and magistrates come from this community. They play a key role in electoral politics. The police delayed filing an FIR, and although the girl in her dying declaration named the four men who had raped her, when the police presented the diluted case before Allahabad High Court, three of the accused were able to walk free while one is serving a brief jail sentence.

The most tragic aspect of this girl’s death was that instead of returning her body to her mourning family, the police locked the family in their home and went ahead and cremated her themselves in a field close to her house.

After her death on September 29, UP Police cited a forensic report that said the girl had not been raped. This report was discredited by doctors at Safdarjung Hospital, where she had been admitted.

A 2018 survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation had found India to be the most dangerous country in the world for women, citing sexual violence, cultural traditions and human trafficking as the main reasons for the ranking. NCRB data shows that there was an average of 87 reported rape cases per day then. The figures have only increased since.

The Supreme Court verdict in the case of remission of Bilkis Bano’s rapists should go a long way in ensuring that rape survivors can hope to obtain justice, even if it takes a long struggle. 

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist)