8 yrs on, girl’s mother relives trauma every day
LUCKNOW: Demonstrations and candle marches that marked the mass movement in Delhi and other cities for justice to the 2012 gang rape victim were not new to Kanpur. This industrial city, a mere 80km from the state capital had witnessed a more or less similar mass movement in 2010, for justice to a nine-year -old girl who died after allegedly being sexually assaulted in school.
Eight years later, the child’s mother still remembers her blood soaked school uniform, pale yellow face and tightly wrapped body.
“A sudden image of the bloodsoaked uniform of my daughter and her tightly wrapped body flashes in my mind whenever I see any girl of her age. She was just 9 and this was certainly not her age to go. Those predators who snatched away my little daughter should be hanged. They don’t have the right to live in society,” she laments.
The nine-year-old’s mother said September 27, 2010, the day she lost her daughter, was still fresh in her memory, even after 8 years. She woke up early and prepared ‘sabzi-‘roti’ for her daughters—one nine years of age and the other 7, who were studying in the same school—Bharti Gyan Sthali in Rawatpur Gaon area, just a few km from her house in Roshan Nagar . “I packed their lunch boxes and dropped them to school ,” she said . She then rushed to Z Square Mall, where she worked as a lady guard.
At around 1:10, she got a call from a neighbour saying her door was locked and her eldest daughter, soaked in blood, was lying on a cot outside .
“I rushed back home, where I didn’t find her. Somebody told me she was serious, so my neighbours took her to the hospital. I rushed to the hospital but on the way I spotted them returning home, carrying the lifeless body of my beloved daughter,” she added.
But this was not all. She said a lady doctor engaged in the post mortem examination told media channels that her daughter was pregnant and died due to miscarriage. “It was a shocking statement from a qualified doctor for my 9-year-old dead daughter, who hadn’t even attained puberty,” she said.
The post mortem examination report came as another shocker. It nullified the claims of the lady doctor and said the girl was sodomised, rupturing her private parts that led to excessive bleeding which caused her death.
On investigation, police found the benches in a computer lab joined together with blood stains on them. They also recovered a blood stained cloth from the school toilet. A day later, parents and social activists thronged the school and staged a massive demonstration outside, demanding early arrest of the culprits. But police resorted to cane charge. Social organisations also alleged that the Kalyanpur police had initially tried to hush up the matter by making some offers to the victim’s mother.
Her lawyer Ajay Bhadauria said as pressure mounted on the cops, they arrested school owner Chandra Pal Verma and his elder son Sudhir Kumar on September 30. On October 6, they also arrested 39-year-old Munna Lodhi, a native of Unnao, claiming that the case had been solved as Lodhi had confessed to raping the nine-year-old girl.
But the victim’s mother found it hard to believe and alleged that the cops were implicating an innocent Lodhi to help the school authorities.
She and Lodhi were tenants in a twostorey house . Lodhi had been living on the first floor for the past 20 years.
The school owner too denied the involvement of his family and said at the time of the incident, they were not in the school. The school manager said that he was informed by the principal that the girl had vomited and was bleeding and he had directed that she be dropped home.
On October 15, police arrested Verma’s son Piyush. The case was then transferred to Cantt police station after the victim’s family expressed dissatisfaction over Kalyanpur police investigation. Later, it was transferred to Crime Branch CID on the report of which the UP government in 2011 suspended three police officers and lodged FIR against one of them. It also ordered inquiry against the then DIG of Kanpur Prem Prakash in the case.
Bhadauria said the matter was now pending in the court of special judge SC/ST Sangeeta Srivastava in Kanpur, at the final argument stage. “There are many evidences against Piyush Verma, the main accused ,” he said. The nine-year old’s mother said she had complete faith in law and would be relieved only after the culprit was hanged.
A sudden image of the bloodsoaked uniform of my daughter and her tightly wrapped body flashes in my mind whenever I see any girl of her age
9-YR-OLD VICTIM’S MOTHER