In India, it’s not easy to report on rape
THE woman cried for an hour. She wept as she told us how one wintry day, as she worked tilling a field, her boss pushed her down to the ground and raped her.
She wept as she described how she’d gone to the police, and they didn’t believe her. She wept as she told us how the entire village turned against her.
As she spoke, she took the edge of her sequined-trimmed sari, the colour of mangoes, and wiped her cheeks. She sat alone on a cot in her front yard in a village about four hours east of New Delhi, India’s capital. A crowd had gathered a short distance away, including the father of her alleged rapist. He was laughing at her.
“The villagers have all been very bad to me,” the woman said. “Nobody believes me. They think I’m faking it. They said they will kill me if I don’t go back on my words. I’m helpless.”
I sat near her in the fitful February sun and watched her closely. After three years reporting in villages in India, I knew enough to try to make sure her tears were real. “Checked for tears. What a cynic,” I wrote in my notebook.
That was not the last note I would write to myself that day. Later on, as conflicting stories rose from the victim’s family, from police, from other villagers, I would scribble helplessly: “Is everybody lying?”
Reporting about rape in Indian villages is not easy. The stigma of sexual assault is so pervasive that the first response to a rape is often silence, or victim-shaming. Ancient caste and family alliances prevail, deals are struck, money changes hands.
But reporting on such crimes has taken on new urgency as the country engages in a debate about women’s safety – in streets, schools, the workplace – following a highly publicised fatal gang rape in 2012.
The country’s overheated media have been paying far more attention to rape cases in the past four years. Under the glare of the spotlight, witness statements can change or become more exaggerated.
A print journalist friend told me he was once sitting talking quietly to a rape victim’s family only to have them burst into dramatic sobs when the TV cameras arrived.
Only about one in four rape cases results in conviction. At the same time, Indian courts are littered with cases of jilted women accusing men of rape to cover up a relationship gone bad, or parents trying to hide – and ruin – a romance between two young lovers from different social castes.
I’d been trying for months to write a story about informal village councils that step in to mitigate sexual assaults and other crimes in lieu of the police – often with brutal punishments.
The piece was to be the first of a yearlong series called India’s Divide, which examined the tension and violence that result when a rising generation of women clashes with the entrenched patriarchy. But first I had to find a case where I could pin down details. That was proving more challenging than I expected.
‘I’m not interfering’
Bina’s case seemed promising. When the 35-year-old widow arrived at the police station to file a complaint, she had claimed, the village leader ordered her alleged assailant to touch Bina’s feet (a gesture of respect), apologise and settle the matter without involving police.
Authorities only took her story seriously when she went to file a complaint at regional police headquarters days later.
When I arrived in her village a few weeks after that, I went to the home of the village elder.
The man ushered us into his courtyard where we were brought cups of sweet, milky chai. He had just been elected village pradhan, a position similar to mayor.
It was there, sitting in the man’s courtyard, as family and neighbours looked on, we heard our first lie of the day.
“I’m not interfering in this matter,” the pradhan said. “I said let the police handle it.”
The pradhan gestured grandly to a crowd of onlookers with a sweep of his hand.
“If her story is true, the whole village would support her anyway,” he said. “Ask these people how many of them support her?”
None of them did. A man of about 70 stepped forward to say: “What I have heard from labourers is that there was a dispute between the boss and the woman. She did not follow his instructions. He told her off and she said: ‘Well, I’m going to the police station.’ She tore her own clothes and pretended she was raped.”
Bina was an outsider in the community, having moved to marry as a child bride at age 14. She told us with a sort of pride that her late husband had refrained from touching her until she was grown. She eventually had seven children.
As she cried, no one comforted her. Her young son hovered anxiously nearby, along with a limping baby goat.
She said she was resting alone in a field on her lunch break from her job working for the government’s rural employment program when her boss accosted her. When he grabbed her, she recalled, she asked him sharply what he was doing.
“‘I’m a government servant and I’m more powerful than you. You can’t say no to me,’” she recalled him saying. “He said: ‘My wife is not at home, she’s gone to her mother’s house, that’s why I’m doing this to you.’”
Something about this little detail of the wife being away rang true to me. But as we spoke to others in the village, I began to have doubts.
The alleged attacker was hiding from the police when we visited, but his family members and others had plenty to say in support of him.
Relatives gathered, as well as women who had worked with Bina in the fields. The women said the rape couldn’t have happened because the area was too exposed, and they had not gone off to take their midday meal leaving her alone.
Bina was not a woman of “good character”, they said, and she kept “picking fights with everyone in the village”.
And there was another possible motive for these women to lie – money. The alleged attacker was in charge of handing out places in the jobs program, and now that he was on the run “we haven’t had any work for days”, one told me.
Things got murkier when we went to the police station where the officers were outside enjoying the afternoon sun. The pradhan had come to meet the victim at the station with the assailant in tow, they said, but they didn’t know what kind of deal was struck.
More damningly, they said that Bina had not told them she was raped when she first went there. They played me a phone video of a later interview they had with her where she said: “When I first came here, I never said I was raped or molested. I could never say it to anyone.”
Yet this, too, could have an explanation. Because of the stigma, many women often don’t report sexual assault right away – or at all.
And these officers too had reason to lie. A new amendment to the rape law requires authorities to register each case or face jail time of up to two years. If they hadn’t taken her seriously, they might have been in trouble.
One of the officers, Pramod Kumar Yadav, gave me a quizzical look. “What do you think of this?” he asked me. “Most cases are a misuse of rape here. It’s highly unlikely they were alone in the field. There was not even a tree to hide them.”
The entire village had accused Bina of lying. But what possible motive could drive her to fight to have the police take her seriously and ostracise herself from her community? It was, as one of my colleagues put it, “a very lonely battle”.
“I don’t want money. I just want my sanity back,” she told me. “I’m scared if this happens to my daughters.”
Bina’s words haunted me: “He said: ‘My wife is not at home . . . that’s why I’m doing this to you.’”
But I decided there were too many questions to write about her, at least in the traditional way. We bid goodbye to the police investigators who would be left to sort through the mess, and hit the road.
I did not envy them.