24 January 2014, 06:55 PM IST
The Birbhum gang rape was waiting to happen. That the village elders made it a spectacle of fear rattles me in faraway Delhi. This is the same village where a girl named Sunita Murmu was stripped, chased, groped and abandoned four years ago. The government of India gave Murmu a bravery award for "braving" the assault, identifying some of the men who attacked her. The only thing she was sure of is that she didn't want to return to that horrible village. And she had only been speaking to a boy from a different caste. Did those who gave the order to strip her receive any punishment? No.
Is it any wonder then that the village elders are allowed to use sexual assault as 'punishment'? Repeatedly? Till it's a case worse than hell? What does it take to jolt a nation? By not punishing these monsters, we let them get away with worse than murder. Revisiting the call for a law against community crime, reproduced below is my blog post dated April 22, 2011.
Act against community crime
The Supreme Court's latest missive on khaps must be sweet music to the self-styled village councils. The apex court has reportedly said that District Magistrates will be held liable if they fail to rein in village councils — such as Haryana's khaps and Tamil Nadu's kattas — from acting like kangaroo courts. Khaps will be happy. What more can a bunch of men with mob-mentality want than for someone else to be punished for their crime? Further, the Court's faith in the police is touching.
Reports say that the apex court has also said that State machinery should institute criminal charges against khap members if they've harmed a couple. But khap panchayats have always said they do not issue directives to harm couples, let alone kill them. After the murder of a couple, khaps have invariably, and naturally so, distanced themselves from the two families involved. The men who have killed, mostly family members, are trotted off to jail. At best, a couple of men are sentenced for a murder an entire village kept quiet on. If a case makes it to the newspapers, the police come in only to maintain 'peace', buy silence, lament the state of affairs and certainly their helplessness.
The absurdly termed 'honour killings' are not like other murders. Murders of couples are only one end of a spectrum of crimes that communities inflict on their own. Community crime flourishes across India in a hundred different shades, all dark and scary — 'honour killings' only one extreme.
The focus cannot be on punishing a few individuals. The village must feel some pain. The focus must be on penalizing the village. Villagers must be made 'stakeholders' in crimes committed with the sanction of all of them. Holding DMs liable isn't the issue really. The problem isn't with law enforcement alone; the problem is in the absence of an applicable law for community crime, which is what honour killings are.
Community crimes make it to the news almost every day. If one day it is a woman in Indore made to walk with burning coal in her hands to prove she is not a thief, the next day it is villagers near Delhi threatening to kidnap all the girls of an enemy village. Yesterday it was two widows killed for having an "affair". Recall the anganwadi worker who had her arms chopped off for defying child marriage. Or the visuals of the gruesome dragging of villagers tied to motorbikes. The blame of allowing the atrocities lies as much with the bystanders as with the actual culprits.
There's nothing to stop the economic and social sanctions that villagers impose either. In Haryana, a khap barred shops from selling any item, including cattle fodder, to the mother-sister duo of killed couple Manoj-Babli. Chandrapati was feted for having the guts to continue fighting for justice despite being isolated in her own village. But even after the court convicted the killers, the community continued to isolate Chandrapati. Her younger son keeps his identity hidden. The stories are dime-a-dozen. In UP's Kinanagar, near Meerut, stunned labourer-fathers of a teenage boy and girl killed with cutlasses by the girl's brothers (arrested) were tersely told by their khap not to grieve as it was 'meant to be'. Stealing of property by village councils, throwing out of entire families are fodder for full-page features in newspapers and that's it.
None of these crimes, all committed by community sanction, can be punished. At a public meeting, Brinda Karat said she visited the village threatened with the kidnap of its girls. This was in retaliation to a resident's elopement with a girl of the bully-village. The attention had the police register a case of 'thuggery'. Karat was stumped. In the Indore case, a couple of policemen were suspended. There's no closure and there's no stopping such behaviour. There's no law under which such crimes can be suitably dealt with.
To bring home how skewed our take on community crime is, take the example of Sunita Murmu. Her case throws into eerily sharp focus the strange workings of the nation's mind. Sixteen-year-old Murmu from West Bengal is among the 23 children who won the 2010 National Bravery Awards for Children. Murmu even got a special mention.
Murmu was attacked when she was caught talking to a boy outside her community in their Santhal village. She was stripped, paraded naked and molested by her own tribesmen. She reportedly raced through fields across three or four villages, where no man or woman or official intervened to protect her; however, she was easy prey and was molested repeatedly. Some recorded the attacks and the MMS spread. NGOs spotted it, and police were pressured to step in. Murmu's bravery, we are told, lies in her daring to identify some of the attackers. And so we impose upon her a cold bravery award. And India plumbs its own sorry depths of insensitivity.
Murmu is certainly not the first child-woman to be stripped and paraded naked. Neither is she the first to have identified some of the molesters. But importantly, it's not enough to nab a few out of tens or hundreds of men and women who jeered at her, mocked her, who didn't step in to either stop the molesters or drag her to protection. Arrests are part of the deal only to appease the Other India. Molesters, attackers pooh-pooh their way out. Remorse, regret, guilt are alien sentiments.
Those who were asked to look at the possibilities of a law for 'honour killing' believe too that the community must face some penalty. They are thus mooting for a community crime law that brings into its ambit a range of such attacks. The idea is that the law must focus on protecting an individual's right and penalize those individuals and community organisations such as khaps who obstruct the exercise of that right. At the most basic level, that includes a person's freedom to speak to or marry of their choice. Such a law will also strengthen the voices within the community that do want to speak out but remain muted in the absence of any form of support. Into any such law must also be woven some form of sanctions on the villagers/ the community: stop funds perhaps.
In Murmu's case, what will stop her community from repeating such an attack on another 15-year-old? In twisted logic, the village might celebrate the chances of winning another bravery award. Surely, awarding punishment on the villages that have so cruelly forced a 'past' into young Murmu's life would have served the child, and the nation, better. If only there were a law to punish her tormentors. To that end, the Supreme Court's attempt at tackling the so-called 'honour killings' via DMs is more an exercise in arm wringing.
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