#ReportingToRemember the Bansal employers and Model Town police for erasing the murder of a minor Nishad woman & harassing the Nishad family when they demanded justice.

On 4 October, 2020, a 17-year-old domestic worker belonging to the Nishad community was found dead in her employer Drupadi Bansal’s house in Model Town, Delhi. Her foster-family, who has been taking care of her ever since her mother’s death many years ago, believe that she was raped and murdered, but the employer’s family and the police claim it was a suicide. The employer’s family consists of Bansals and Mittals, both belonging to powerful Bania or mercantile castes. The Nishad community is a marginalized caste, classified as OBC in Delhi.

A few hours before her body was discovered, the victim had called her foster mother, Kusum, to say that Bansal was forcing her to sleep in the driver’s room even though she didn’t want to do so, and she asked her foster mother to come and take her because she didn’t like it there. Kusum, her foster mother, had arranged for her to work at the Bansal house approximately a week before that day. Kusum and Bansal had agreed that her daughter would sleep in the dining room, which had a CCTV camera, and would therefore secure her safety.

Kusum could not go to pick her up immediately as she had to attend to work. When Kusum went back home, she found out that she had received a call from Drupadi Bansal’s daughter Renu Mittal while she was at work. Kusum called Renu Mittal back. Mittal told Kusum on the phone that she was coming to pick her up and take her to the Bansal house because Kusum’s daughter had locked herself in a room and was refusing to come out.

On the way, Mittal dissuaded Kusum from calling her daughter, saying that they were going to reach soon anyway. Kusum arrived at the Bansal house, to find dozens of policemen present there, some sipping cold drinks. Renu Mittal asked Kusum to go meet her daughter. Renu Mittal continued upstairs to her mother’s house (the Bansal house). Bansal’s son (Mittal’s brother) was also in the house.

Kusum went inside to find her daughter’s body hanging from the ceiling in the driver’s room. Kusum noticed that the cloth with which her daughter was hanging did not belong to her. She also noticed that her daughter’s body bore boils, bruises on her hands, back and armpits. Kusum was then forcibly dragged out of the site by the police.

The police used every tactic including harassment, abuse, intimidation, to keep the victim’s body from her family.

The victim’s family was pressured to give multiple statements, and they alleged that the Bansals did not come into the police station even once to give a statement in the days following the death. Though the police said that the Bansals had been called to the station on the 4th of October, the victim’s family claimed that they had been at the station the entire time and never saw them come in.

Kusum experienced a lack of action towards justice. She was denied her right to be with her daughter’s body. Kusum was also denied any information about this case. The Bansal’s refused to speak to the victim’s family or allow them inside their house.

Kusum and her family along with neighbours showed resistance, and brought attention to this matter by breaking planter pots in front of the Bansal house on the 7th of October. They demanded answers from the Bansal family.

Following this incident, the police detained 12 people from amongst the family and their neighbours. The men and women taken in police custody, were assaulted and abused. The police pulled the women by their hair, beating them, and hurling insults. Many police officers, in an inebriated state, forced the men to jump, hitting them every time they stopped jumping. The police released them only after warning them to not demand an FIR and threatened to file false cases against them under the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 if they dared to try to file one. The police threatened to get all of them evicted.The police beat up the victim’s 12-year-old cousin. The police also threatened to declare the victim’s body as unclaimed and burn it.

Burning the body is both denying the family their right to last rites, and also erasing any form of evidence. Forceful burning of the body is part of a pattern of denial of justice in cases of caste-based sexual violence. It is an assertion of power that denies the victim’s family the power of testimony and witness by destroying evidence. It is also a form of humiliation as it is a refusal of the victim’s family’s agency to perform the victim’s last rites.

The police refused to hand over the body to Kusum saying that the post-mortem could not be conducted without the presence of the victim’s biological father, who lived out of town. The police refused to hand over the body even though another biological relative of the victim, her sister, was available in the city to accept the body. The post-mortem was finally conducted 4 days after the incident, on 8th October, when the victim’s biological father arrived. However, instead of handing over the body to the family, the police forcefully burnt the body of the victim. The family was also not allowed to access the full post mortem report which came out after the body was burnt. Earlier, the police had refused to file an FIR, claiming that they could only do so after the post-mortem. However, they continued to refuse to file the FIR, saying that half of the report was still pending. Out of the 26-page report, only the first three pages were shared with the family, which termed the cause of death as asphyxia, or inability to breathe. Whether or not sexual violence was ruled out in the post-mortem or whether there was any foul play was not clear since the full report was not shared with the family. The cause of death does not rule out foul play from the victim’s death.

On October 16, 2020 Kusum’s family and neighbours, along with students from the nearby Delhi University staged a protest outside the Model Town police station, demanding an FIR into her death. The protestors, including a reporter from the Caravan, were forcefully detained and abused in custody. Many of the detained protestors and people who came out in support of Kusum were from her neighbourhood Gurmandi, a predominantly Dalit locality, where many work as domestic workers.

The police has still not registered an FIR, and has declared it a case of suicide without any evidence or investigation. The victim’s family believes that there has been foul play in the case, as the last time when Kusum had spoken to her daughter suggested that she was in distress, following which the Bansal family’s accounts were not consistent with what her daughter had told her on the call. Following this, the Bansal’s apathy towards the death, the marks of violence she had seen on the victim’s body, and the lack of transparency and abuse from the police are all a refusal of the victim’s family’s right to an investigation.

Kusum’s daughter’s employment at the Bansal house came with certain agreements to ensure her safety, such as the place where she would be sleeping. These terms were ignored and her daughter communicated with her that she was being mistreated and was in distress. In spite of this, Kusum and her family were consistently discredited and treated as unreliable, while her daughter’s testimony was ignored. As a Bahujan domestic worker, her safety and dignity while she was alive, and her life itself, were treated as dispensable. While colluding and cooperating with the upper-caste Bansal employers and enabling them to escape accountability for an unnatural death that occured in their house, the police used tactics of violence, intimidation, humiliation and harassment against the victim’s family to refuse their right to due process and justice. Any attempts at protesting against the injustice were met with violent punishment, not just against the victim’s immediate family, but also her community. The caste-based sexual violence against Kusum’s daughter was followed by further caste-based violence against Kusum and her community for daring to be assertive. Through the police inaction and violence, a larger message was sent to the community about the lack of the State’s will to uphold dignity and justice for domestic workers from caste-based sexual violence.