Justice in one case does not signal the end of crimes against Dalit women. But it does signal one tiny step forward in a longer march against caste hierarchy.
Dalit women face sexual abuse daily, said Manjula Pradeep, convenor, National Council of Women Leaders. When rape survivors try to file police complaints, they are accused of filing false cases. “They don’t see us as human beings. The impunity is widespread,” she said. (PTI)
At 16, she wanted to be a teacher like her father and left home to enroll in a training course — the first Dalit girl from her region, Barmer in Rajasthan, to go for higher education. A year later, on March 29, 2016, she was dead, her body found in a water tank on the roof of the teaching institute.
The previous night, the weeping girl had called her father. She told him that the hostel warden, Priya Shukla, the wife of the principal Pragya Prateek Shukla, had sent her to clean the physical training instructor Vijendra Singh’s room. There, Singh had raped her. The trio then made her sign a document, saying it was an act of “mutual consent”. The next morning the police called the father to tell him his daughter was dead. Her body was hauled off in a garbage truck. (Read Dhrubo Jyoti’s report here).
It took five years, six months, and 84 trips to the court — 12 hours each way — for the verdict: Life imprisonment for Vijendra Singh and six years for the Shuklas. The father had to hire personal security for fear of reprisals from the dominant castes, reports The Leaflet. He took loans, but didn’t give up hope for justice.
The judgment coincides with the first anniversary of the Hathras crime where a Dalit girl was gang raped and killed and her body cremated at night by the police. It is a grim reminder of how caste-based crime continues unchecked. In a year that saw a general decline in crimes against women and children, crimes against Scheduled Castes showed a 9.4% spike, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
Dalit women face sexual abuse daily, said Manjula Pradeep, convenor, National Council of Women Leaders. When rape survivors try to file police complaints, they are accused of filing false cases. “They don’t see us as human beings. The impunity is widespread,” she said.
A recent e-book, No Lockdown on Caste Atrocities, released by the Dalit Human Rights Defenders Network, contains a litany of horror stories that are routine in modern India: A Dalit graduate and his mother assaulted for asking for water from the community tap; another boy stripped naked and beaten for touching the motorcycle of a dominant caste man; a 16-year-old Dalit girl raped in Gujarat’s Bhavnagar district, her spine broken, by a dominant caste man. These are not isolated incidents, but part of a pattern “to brutally assert the deep-rooted caste hierarchy,” states the book.
Justice in one case does not signal the end of crimes against Dalit women. But it does signal one tiny step forward in a longer march against caste hierarchy.
“Dalit women have come a long way from pain to power, from oppression to assertion,” said Pradeep.
Justice for the girl, named after the place where a river breaks out into several branches before it enters the sea, spells out hope for so many.
Namita Bhandare writes on gender
The views expressed are personal