Gang rape reveals India’s vigilante underworld
13 men in jail for six-hour attack
“FOR MANY OF THEM, THEIR LEADERS ARE THE LAW.”
AJOY MENON
NEW DELHI — The village elder delivered his judgment shortly before midnight. The woman was deemed to have sinned. She was a Hindu who’d had a relationship with a married Muslim outsider. To restore village honour, he said, she needed to be punished.
The sentence he settled on: rape by her neighbours.
A crowd of 300 people watched the trial on Jan. 20, and at least one captured the proceedings on his cellphone. On the orders of the headman, the 20-year-old woman was untied from a tree in the remote Indian village of Subalpur, taken to a thatched shed and raped repeatedly over a period of about six hours, according to a police report of the victim’s testimony. Among her alleged attackers: the headman himself.
“These people do not fear the police. They fear their own tribal leaders,” said Ajoy Menon, a police constable in the Birbhum district in West Bengal state, where the rape occurred. “Most of them don’t abide by the same laws you and I do. For many of them, their leaders are the law.”
The latest Indian rape case to reverberate around the world reveals the workings of an informal justice system that sets rules and imposes sanctions for many of the 800 million people living in rural India. In the world’s largest democracy, the village councils rule on issues including marriage, property and women’s attire. Many of them reinforce a religious and caste-based system that helps block India’s most marginalized from escaping illiteracy and a life lived on $2 a day or less.
Police in Birbhum say they also have cellphone footage of the rape. Three officers stood guard outside the victim’s room at the hospital where she was being treated a week after the assault.
Thirteen men are in custody and have been denied bail. Their lawyer says they will plead not guilty. In the village, six residents denied the woman was raped, though they say she was tried and tied to a tree.
“Our village leader, he’s like a father figure to us,” said Mollika Todo, a female villager whose relative is one of the men arrested for the rape.
A 2011 ruling by the Supreme Court that ordered state governments to prosecute members of village councils who take the law into their own hands hasn’t put an end to this parallel justice system. About 90 per cent of rural disputes in India are resolved at the informal level because of the paucity of judges and courts in remote areas, said Kripa Ananthpur, an assistant professor at Chennaibased Madras Institute of Development Studies who researches informal governments.
In parts of India where communities are segregated by caste and religion, people have paid with their lives for ignoring local custom. Those who flout traditional mores barring marriage outside of their community or religion can face social ostracism, including eviction from their village, by order of the councils.
About 1,000 people, mainly women, are murdered in honour killings every year, many ordered by village councils that ruled the victim had brought shame on family or clan, according to the Honour Based Violence Awareness Network, a London-based research organization that fights honour killings around the world. In Birbhum district, at least three women were stripped, beaten and paraded for several kilometres along a country road on orders of a village council in 2010. Their alleged transgression: having relationships with men from neighbouring communities.
Council leaders have issued bans on women wearing jeans and carrying cellphones in some parts of the country, according to local media reports. In an incident that grabbed headlines nationally, a village chief blamed the consumption of chow mein for the rise in rape cases in Haryana in 2012. He explained it caused hormonal imbalances that led to rape, according to a report in the Times of India.
“Modernity, the perception of western values, it’s encroaching on the villagers who are clutching at their ancient cultural identity,” said Biplab Mukherjee, a co-ordinator at the Kolkatabased group Masum, which researches police abuse.
About 160 kilometres north of Kolkata is Subalpur village, where the rape took place. Accessible only via a narrow, bumpy dirt road, it is home to about 400 people living in a warren of thatched mud-brick homes. Many have an adjoining pen with cows or water buffalo.
Villagers said they were aware the woman was having a relationship with a married Muslim man from another village. She had recently returned from a trip to New Delhi that had changed her, said Sunil Murmur, a man from a neighbouring settlement who said he knew the woman.
She came back speaking Hindi, in a region where Bengali is the main dialect, Murmur said. A visit to her hut on Jan. 26 showed Bollywood posters adorning one wall, name-brand creams and imported snacks sitting on a shelf affixed to another wall, and glass bangles hanging from a rod.
“Her family denied the affair, but she continued to misbehave,” Murmur said. “So the village chief decided she would be punished.”
Villagers in Subalpur agreed on the events that led up to the punishment. After being dragged out of her hut and tried in a dusty clearing in the centre of the village, the woman and the man with whom she had had the relationship were fined 50,000 rupees (about $890) by the local council.
The woman’s family was too poor to pay her share of the fine. It was reduced to 2,000 rupees, but they were still unable to pay. The village head then gave the order to “Go have fun with her,” according to the police report obtained by Bloomberg News.
The man’s family paid the fine and he fled the area. His wife, who lives in a nearby village, said she hasn’t seen him since.
It took the woman almost two days to escape from her village after she was raped, according to the police report. Neighbours prevented her from leaving and allegedly threatened to burn down the family home if they spoke to the district authorities. After reaching a police station, she was sent to a hospital about an hour’s drive from her village.
Amal Karmar, a doctor who treated the victim and who helps manage the hospital, said in a Jan. 25 interview that her injuries clearly indicated she’d been raped by multiple people. The woman was in stable condition, he said.
In nearby villages, residents condemned the rape. “What the leader has ordered is unacceptable,” said S.K. Chowdhury, 52, a shopkeeper in Labhpur village, about a 25-minute drive from Subalpur. “There’s nothing wrong with village councils, but there is something wrong when one person uses his power to do something as terrible as this.”
Sheik Jogral, who owns a fish shop in Chowhatta village, where the Muslim man lived, said it’s better to take disputes to local leaders. Elected politicians and police don’t understand the village way of life and may be corrupt, while local councils offer swift justice, he said.
“Normally we prefer to settle things among ourselves, among our own people,” Jogral said. “We don’t have any connection to the local government, ministers or police if we can avoid it.”
Village leadership is usually passed on from father to son and tends to remain within the family until there are no more male offspring, said Ananthpur, the Madras institute assistant professor. When that happens, the village meets to appoint a new leader, who will probably come from the dominant caste and have some education, she said.
“Some have now included women in the councils while others have appointed lawyers as their village leaders,” Ananthpur said. “This particular example is horrendous. I’ve never seen anything this bad.”