“If she was actually being raped why wouldn’t she have killed her rapists with the sickle she had with her for cutting grass?”
“Why would no one have heard her scream?”
“Why would a man who had two daughters, rape her?”
“The Valmikis have gone too far”.
September 14, 2020: Manisha Valmiki, a 19 year old Dalit woman, was working on her family’s fields in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh. When she didn’t return home, her mother went to look for her, and found her lying on the ground, barely conscious, severely injured, and soaked in blood.
She had allegedly been abducted, raped, and assaulted by four men from the Thakur-Rajput caste, Ramkumar, Ravi, Sandeep, and Luvkush. The Thakurs are a powerful landowning caste in Uttar Pradesh who command feudal power and political influence. The current Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Ajay Bisht alias Yogi Adityanath, belongs to the same caste.
The Thakurs lived right across the street from the Valmiki family for years, and resented the fact that the Valmiki family, belonging to a formerly-untouchable caste associated with manual scavenging, had been working on their own fields rather than working for the Thakurs. As of 2020, the village continues to practise untouchability against the Valmikis. Upper caste communities sprinkle water to purify their shops after the Valmikis leave, and for them to buy everything they touch.
20 years ago, one of the Thakur men who raped and assaulted Manisha, had attacked Manisha’s grandfather as well. The Thakur man, along with his father, had tried to stab and murder Manisha’s grandfather. This violence was committed because Manisha’s grandfather had asked the Thakurs to graze their buffaloes outside of the Valmiki family’ land. The Thakur’sattempt to murder Manisha’s grandfather was not successful, but they cut off his fingers instead.
Four months before the rape, the Thakur men had been harassing Manisha and even threatened to harm her family. Their harassment was so incessant that Manisha refused togo out of her house alone.
Manisha was abducted from her own land, near her own home, in broad daylight. The police never visited the crime scene, insisting on filing only an ‘attempt to murder’ case until she gained consciousness, eight days after the violence had taken place. India’s guidelines for medical examinations of sexual violence state that the chances of finding evidence are greatly reduced 72 hours after the incident. A maximum of 4 days, or 96 hours, should pass before medical samples are taken. Despite this, thehe UP police collected the medical sample 11 days after the violence took place.
The test results never came back while she was alive, but Manisha gave her testimony before she died despite the severe injuries that she sustained on her tongue while being strangled. She named the four Thakur men who had raped her. A dying declaration is admissible in Indian courts as evidence of sexual violence.
The police forcefully burnt her body at 2:30 AM on September 30, barring her own family from seeing the body or performing her last rites. Nearly 150 police officials formed a human chain blockading their home, restricting the family’s access to the body as the police set fire to the body. The family had been demanding the medical report with urgency while Manisha was still alive. However, the police shared the report with the family only after she had died from her severe injuries inflicted by the Thakur rapists, and her body had been forcibly burnt by the police who represent Thakur Chief Minister Ajay Bisht’s government.
The medical report stated that Manisha had not been raped because there was no presence of semen. Her testimony was erased and ignored, and her family began to be intimidated and threatened by the State. Savarna groups like the Rashtriya Savarna Parishad and BJP MLAs organized events and protests in support of the accused, calling it a ‘fake case’. As the community mobilized in protest to demand justice for Manisha, Section 144 was imposed in Hathras. Siddique Kappan, a journalist on his way to cover the case, was arrested. FIRs were filed against Bhim Army Chief Chandrashekhar Azad and 600 other protestors. The police stopped journalists from entering the village in order to block information and to gradually erase the case from public memory. Manisha’s family’s communication was tapped and their privacy violated. A Special Investigation Team constituted by the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister recommended a narcoanalysis test for the victim’s family to ascertain if they were telling the truth in their allegations. Narcoanalysis is the use of a drug, sodium pentothal on a person to ‘induce’ truth’ The narcoanalysis test is an outdated, unscientific ‘truth test’ often associated with coerced confessions. The police seized Manisha’s family’s phones and assaulted her father. Dr Azeem Malik, the Chief Medical Officer at the Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital medical college under the Aligarh Muslim University publicly contradicted the police’s version. He challenged the validity of the forensic report taken 11 days after the violence took place. Soon after, he was terminated from his position by the Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University.
Source - https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/hathras-rape-dalit-woman-caste-atrocities-thakur-supremacy-violence-uttar-pradesh-police-state#read-more
The state machinery of Uttar Pradesh used all its power to stifle the demand for justice coming from all quarters, protect the accused, and discredit the victim and her family.
The kin of the accused have gone on record to dismiss the entirety of Manisha’s testimony. They say that the rape allegations are false and fabricated for political benefit.
“If she was actually being raped why wouldn’t she have killed her rapists with the sickle she had with her for cutting grass?”
“Why would no one have heard her scream?”
“Why would a man who had two daughters, rape her?”
When all else fails, they say- these Valmikis have gone too far. “Yeh log sar pe chadh gaye hain”
Referring to the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act they say,
“Everyone knows Dalits have always used the Harijan (sic) Act to target upper castes”
“I have heard that the girl’s family killed her and framed the upper caste men. These people can go to any extent for money”
While refusing “permission” to her family from taking her body, the police rebukes them, saying- “We might have made mistakes, but you made mistakes too”
The District Magistrate visits the Valmiki family and says- “Do you want to ruin your credibility? The media will leave in a few days, but we will remain in the village”
BJP leader Ranjeet Bahadur Srivastava says, “She must have had an affair with one of the boys and got caught.”
BJP MLA Surendra Singh off-handedly insulting Manisha’s family, says, “Rapes can only be stopped with sanskaar. It's the duty of all mothers and fathers to imbibe good values in their daughters and bring them up in cultured environments."
Exactly 14 years ago on the day Manisha succumbed to her injuries, Surekha and Priyanka Bhotmange were stripped, paraded naked, raped, and murdered by a mob of people belonging to the dominant Kunbi caste in Khairlanji, Maharashtra. The men from their families were tortured and murdered. The Bhotmanges had also attempted to stand in the face of casteism in their village.
Nearly 10 Dalit women are raped every day. Though there is no data about the identity of the rapists, a pattern emerges from most instances of violence that are reported. The people who rape, harass, assault, and murder Dalit women are powerful, upper-caste men, who want to punish them for asserting their agency, for educating themselves, for owning land, for walking alone, for going to work, for simply daring to claim personhood in a society where it is constantly denied to them.
But the violence itself is never the end of the brutal indignities Dalit women and their families have to face.
Sexual violence is followed by harassment and negligence from the police authorities, criminalisation of the victim’s family, humiliation and intimidation from police, politicians, rapists, and the constant dehumanization in public memory. The violence inflicted on Dalit women is invisibilised, or their trauma made into sensationalised news that is forgotten as soon as it is published. The caste-based nature of the violence is undermined and the perpetrators’s caste identity goes unreported and protected. Often killed in order to be silenced, their testimonies are ignored, discredited, and made light of. The few women who survive sexual violence are driven to commit suicide from fear and shame. The perpetrators, supported by power structures located in caste solidarities of the police, media, and politicians, remain untouched and unaccountable.
We #PledgetoNeverForget Manisha Valmiki because she was raped and murdered by Thakur men and she was not believed.
We #PledgetoNeverForget the Valmiki family whose pleas for justice have been faced by intimidation and harassment and who are still standing strong in the face of the casteism of the entire country.
We are #ReportingToRemember the crimes of the Thakur-Rajput rapists, police, and state, and all those who are working to undermine and stifle Manisha’s testimony.
We pledge to work towards holding accountable a society driven by power and caste solidarities that invisibilises the injustices faced by Dalit women. We pledge to never forget.
Source - https://www.huffpost.com/archive/in/entry/hathras-rape-not-nirbhaya-caste-crime_in_5f795880c5b64cf6a25162ff
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