High Price of Justice in UP

The image of the 17-year old rape victim from Unnao, Uttar Pradesh (UP) is engraved in my mind. A slim, round-faced girl dressed in an orange kurta and black churidar; her overwrought face covered with a maroon polka-dotted dupatta. She is so weak that she keeps gasping for breath and is scarcely able to speak a few words.

She dared levy rape charges against four-time MLA from the state, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who had won the 2014 elections from Bangarmau located in Unnao. The BJP MLA and his brothers are notorious musclemen who have kept the villagers in terror by using a combination of fear, money power and caste domination. He is also reported to be close to the present UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath. 

The victim is now fighting for her life in the King George Medical College in Lucknow. The Ambassador car in which she was travelling along with her two aunts and her lawyer, Mahendra Singh, to Rae Bareli to meet her uncle, who is lodged in a jail there, was hit by a truck this Sunday. Her two aunts died on the spot.

We have to wait and see whether this young girl survives this alleged attempt on her life but there is no doubt that this young girl had little idea about the trial by fire that she and her family would be subjected to once she took the unheard step of lodging a rape charge against the power centre in her village.

I met the rape survivor in a spacious but crumbling guest house in Unnao named after former Prime Minister Charan Singh. A large disinterested police force was standing around in the garden during my hour-long meeting. She was lying on a bed while four policewomen sat on chairs next to her. They were completely disinterested in her. Two of them were busy on their mobile phones.

The survivor kept moaning. It was obvious that she was in a state of terror, as were her other family members. What she did succeed in telling me was the following: “I am completely terrorised and shattered at how my father was beaten to death by the brother, Atul, and other associates of the vidhayak (MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar).”

The rape survivor was not a witness to the beating of her father. But there were villagers who reportedly witnessed how mercilessly the man was thrashed by Atul Sengar and his goons on April 3, 2018. 

One of them, Mohammed Yunus, 32, who owns a grocery shop at the Makhi intersection where the father had been beaten, had given a statement to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) confirming this. The CBI had made him a key witness in the case. Sengar is at present in jail and the CBI has filed a chargesheet against him.

Yunus died under mysterious circumstances on  August 18, 2018. He was provided no police protection. The rape survivor had been given police protection. In her village, her house practically faces the large Sengar house. When I visited it, there was a large contingent of policemen seated outside both Sengar’s and her home. Needless to say, her home was in a fairly dilapidated state and was locked up while the Sengar house was palatial and shared a common compound with an impressive-looking school building and an intermediate college which were owned and run by him. His house was abuzz with people.

Despite the UP government having given clear instructions that the rape survivor be provided 24x7 police protection, given the sensitivity of the case, not a single policeman was with her at the time a truck rammed into the Ambassador car in which she and her family members were travelling. Two women constables and a gunner were expected to be with her all the time but, strangely, all three were absent when the car was hit.

Her mother, two younger sisters and younger brother have been rushed to Lucknow. Her mother blames Sengar for this accident and both she and her sisters speak about how, although Sengar is lodged in jail, his henchmen are constantly threatening them and their family members of dire consequences unless they withdraw the charges against him.

When I had spoken to the mother last year at the guest house, she had not come to terms with Sengar taking the extreme step of having her husband killed. An illiterate woman, she was completely at a loss on how to handle the difficult situation.

Lamenting her loss, she had said that if they had wanted to punish them, Sengar could have cut off his arm or even his ears. “But what did he do? He sent back his body. Now, I have the responsibility of these four girls and my young son. Who is going to share this burden with me,” the mother sobbed.

There is no doubt that the rape survivor’s father died under very mysterious circumstances. When he was brought to the Unnao District Hospital on  April 3, he had 48 abrasions on his body, according to the hospital medical report. He was treated and sent to the Unnao jail the very next day. The doctors at the hospital admit that he should not have been discharged but they agreed to do so because of “pressure from higherups”. 

On April 5, inside the jail, the father complained of stomach ache and vomiting. And, although two district hospital physicians visited the jail that day, he was not shown to them. On April 7, he was brought to the hospital again, when an ultrasound was done but the doctors said he was fit to go back to jail. On April 8, he was back at the hospital again, with a perforated intestine. He died a few hours later.

Subsequently, the survivor and her mother left for Lucknow where the young girl tried to immolate herself outside chief minister Adityanath’s residence. That is how the case shot into national prominence.

The rape survivor’s problems were compounded by the cultural prejudices that make adolescent life so difficult in villages. A majority of adolescent girls end up as school dropouts spending their time in housework or eking out a small income from agricultural work. As they grow older, the mobile phone is used as a source of interaction and entertainment by young girls and boys.

It could well be that the victim was friendly with boys in her village, one of them being Shubhan Singh, son of Shashi and Harpal Singh. Shashi Singh is the lady who took her to Sengar’s house, and who, she claims, stood guard outside the room while the MLA allegedly molested her.

But the rape survivor has claimed that she was abducted by three boys, Shubhan, his driver Naresh Tiwari, and Brijesh Yadav. When she went missing, her mother filed a complaint at the Makhi police station which was registered on June 20, 2017. The girl was recovered the next day and on the basis of her statement registered in the thana 9police station) on June 22, 2017 that she had been raped, all three boys were arrested. 

This made the survivor’s family ‘unpopular’ in their village and they decided to lie low. The girl and her father shifted to Nangloi in Delhi for some time, where they stayed with her father’s younger brother.

The rape survivor and her family were determined that since she had filed an earlier FIR against the three boys, they would persist and file an FIR against Sengar, whom she accused of raping her on June 4, 2017. When Sengar and his brothers heard about this, they tried to exert pressure on the family to withdraw the FIR going to the extent of telling the family that he would help them get the girl married. But the family refused to relent and the victim’s father got posters printed in which Sengar was depicted as a 10-headed monster. Apparently, this is when he decided to retaliate.

When I visited Sengar’s house, the front verandah was full of villagers. His two sisters who live in Lucknow were holding court. The more vocal of them, when informed that I was from the press, started a tirade against the rape survivor. She made me listen to a Whatsapp video of the girl having an intimate conversation with a boy. She then denounced the victim for being a girl of “loose character”. Her late father was dismissed as a history-sheeter who had “20 cases” lodged against him and she said that he was killed by villagers because of his misdeeds. The sister’s audience listened in silence. 

A walk around the village made it clear that Sengar’s writ run large. No one was willing to utter a word against him. Sengar has consolidated his 20-year career in politics by ensuring the support of local Thakur caste politicians including the notorious Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiya.

He has built large business interests, including an intermediate college, a school, several brick kilns, jewellery shops, apart from owning farmlands.

His businesses are run by his family members including his three brothers. The most notorious of these is Atul, who reportedly shot at an ASP, Ramlal Verma, in 2004, when he tried to stop their illegal mining business. Verma was transferred from Unnao and reportedly withdrew the case against him under pressure. Ten years later, Atul is reported to have fired at another man, this time a journalist’s father, to send a warning because his son had been writing about their business dealings.

The survivor’s uncle, Mahesh Singh, who was also under arrest but to whom I was given access, spoke about their continuous harassment at the hands of the police. When the rape survivor had filed a complaint against her forcible abduction, Shashi Singh and her husband Haripal Singh filed a counter FIR claiming that she was not 16 years old at the time of the alleged rape but that she had forged her documents and was actually aged 17.

But even Mahesh Singh had no premonition a year ago that their family would have to pay such a heavy price when his niece decided to raise her voice and demand her family and she be given justice.

Politicians have jumped on to the bandwagon and Swati Maliwal, who heads the Delhi Commission for Women, visited Lucknow in support of the victim. But the question is, where was the show of support during the last two years, and why politicians failed to speak up. The Supreme Court must take up this case sou motu, to ensure that justice prevails.

The writer is an independent journalist based in Delhi.