#ReportingToRemember the Bassi Police, a Rajasthan Sessions Court, an MLA, and the then Chief Minister of Rajasthan for blaming & shaming Bhanwari Devi

On September 22, 1992, Bhanwari Devi, a Bahujan woman who used to work as a sathin in Bhateri, Rajasthan, was gangraped by five men from the Gujjar caste. Her husband was beaten up at the same time. Bhanwari Devi belongs to the Kumhar caste which is traditionally associated with pottery, Since 1985, Bhanwari Devi had been selected and trained to work as a sathin. Sathins are grassroots workers employed as part of the Women Development Project, Rajasthan.

The Prajapat Kumhar caste, which Bhanwari Devi belonged to, is classified as an OBC in the state. She has also been reported to be a Dalit woman in many sources including the Court judgement. This can be attributed to differences between administrative and social categorizations or errors in reportage. However, it is clear that she belonged to a far less powerful caste than her perpetrators, who were from the Gujjar caste. The Gujjar caste too is classified as OBC. However, the Kumhars are a minority compared to the Gujjars. The Gujjars in comparison were the majority dominant caste and held economic and political power. Badri, one of the perpetrators, was a Gujjar, and a prominent local politician. Gujjars were a powerful group in the Bassi block, and the local Member of Parliament, Rajesh Pilot, was not only a Gujjar but also a cabinet minister in the Central Government at the time. The fact that all of these multiple positions of power were held by Gujjars, worked strongly against Bhanwari Devi.

When she began work on a campaign to stop child marriage in 1992, she found herself alienated by the people of the village who got increasingly hostile towards her. The state government in 1992 had decided to observe the fortnight preceding the Akha Teej festival as an anti-child marriage fortnight, as the festival is believed to be an auspicious time in Hinduism, and results in marriages and especially child marriages amongst Hindu families. The District Collector had asked the sathins to prepare a list of villages in the district where child marriage was rampant. The Sub-Divisional Officer (SDO) and Deputy Superintendent of the Police (DySP) were on alert and making rounds of these villages. Bhanwari Devi was seen by the villagers as the cause for this police intervention in her village.

On the day of Akha Teej, she tried to stop the marriage of a one-year-old girl in Ram Karan Gujjar’s family. Bhanwari Devi knew that she would face retaliation for this, and had told the officials that the Gujjars would come after her. But she was asked to stop the marriage regardless of this danger, and she was faced with a hostile response from the family. The MLA of the area also opposed her strongly. A policeman was sent to stop the wedding. Instead of stopping the wedding, he engaged in the festivities and left. The Gujjars bribed the police and conducted the wedding the next morning.he entire incident was seen as Bhanwari Devi insulting the ‘honour’ of the Gujjar caste and their village.

After this incident, Bhanwari Devi and her husband were socially boycotted by the village- their fields were destroyed and their fodder stolen. They were denied access to basic living resources including water and milk. Those who did not boycott her were threatened by the Gujjars and forced to withdraw support. This hostility finally culminated on September 22, 1992, when Bhanwari Devi and her husband were working on their fields. Her husband, Mohan Lal Prajapat was attacked by brothers Ram Sukh Gujjar, Ram Karan Gujjar, and Gyarsa Gujjar, their uncle Badri Gujjar, and a Brahmin man, Shravan Sharma. Hearing his screams, Bhanwari rushed to the spot. Shravan Sharma and Ram Karan Gujjar held Mohan down, Ram Sukh Gujjar held Bhanwari Devi down, and Gyarsa Gujjar and Badri Gujjar raped her.

As a woman from an oppressed caste speaking publicly about sexual violence and decidedly seeking legal recourse, Bhanwari Devi was faced by victim blame from all parts of society for years to come.

The process of reporting the violence was marked by humiliation and dismissal.
The police refused to file an FIR. They argued with her for hours and humiliated Bhanwari Devi. The deputy Superintendent of Police at the Bassi police stations made statements such as "Aji saab, ranjish ke maare jooth bhi likhwa dete hain" (Due to personal enmity people sometimes make false allegations“ and “Madam, do you know the meaning of rape?”. The male doctor at the Primary Health Centre in the area refused to conduct her medical examination and forced her to travel all the way to Jaipur. However, in his reference letter he asked for an examination not for rape but for “confirming the age of the victim”. At the SMS Hospital in Jaipur too, the medical jurist refused to conduct the medical examination without orders from the magistrate and the magistrate refused to give them any orders, asking them instead to meet him the next day in court. Bhanwari Devi and her husband waited at the police station the entire night. Finally, the medical examination was conducted 52 hours after the incident, and even then, did not record all her injuries properly. When she came back to Bhateri, the police made her deposit the lehenga she was wearing as evidence. The police forced Bhanwari Devi to wear her husband’s blood stained turban as clothing while she walked back to her home. During this time, the local MLA also made a statement at the state legislature saying that Bhanwari Devi was lying.

The villagers, instead of holding the rapists accountable, blamed Bhanwari Devi for making a ‘private’ matter of the village ‘public’, hence insulting the village’s honour. The men of the village were hostile towards Bhanwari for registering the case and reportedly on one occasion, forced her to swear on her son in the presence of a crowd that she had been raped in order to prove her allegations.

The then Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, made a public statement saying “Dhaule baal wali mahila se kaun balatkar karega?” (Who would rape a grey-haired woman?) and refused to believe her allegations.

The accused were arrested more than a year after the incident, after the case was shifted to the jurisdiction of the CBI. During the course of the investigation, Bhanwari Devi was made to recount her statement multiple times, forcing her to relive the trauma of the violence again and again. Justice NM Tibrewal, the High Court judge who was first hearing the case had refused a plea for bail for the accused, saying he believed Bhanwari Devi’s testimony. However, the judges on the case were inexplicably changed five times. During the trial, Bhanwari Devi was humiliated and intimidated, being forced to recall the details of the violence in the presence of 17 men, including the perpetrators. She had to describe the act of rape explicitly in front of the accused. The matter was reported in the village and she had to suffer abusive taunts from the other villagers.

All five accused were acquitted by a Sessions Court in 1995, in a judgement that ignored her testimony and her husband’s witness, instead resorting to victim blame. The judgement blamed Bhanwari Devi for the violence inflicted on her by calling into question her purity and her morality.

The judgement blamed her husband, saying “it is not possible in Indian culture that a man who has taken a vow to protect his wife, in front of the Holy fire, just stands and watches his wife being raped, when only two men, almost twice his age,were holding him.”

It discredited her testimony, saying “ there are three brothers and an uncle among the accused, and so, it is preposterous to believe that an uncle and his nephew would commit rape together”.

It said, “Among the accused is a Brahmin while the rest are Gujjars. Since gangs in rural areas are almost never multi-caste, the charge that members of two different castes acted together is highly improbable”.

It blamed her saying, “Bhanwari Devi neither immediately informed anyone (for instance, her in-laws) about the rape nor did she immediately file an FIR for the same”.

It further discredited her and blamed her by saying, “ Since Bhanwari Devi is a Dalit woman and all the accused men belong to upper-castes, it is ludicrous to believe that the latter would ignore the caste hierarchy and put themselves at a risk of being polluted by coming in contact with the former, let alone rape her”.

The judgement also dismissed her entire testimony saying, “the Indian rural society could not have sunk so low that a villager would lose all his senses of age and caste and pounce upon a woman like a wolf”.

The lehenga produced as evidence which was not the same one she had deposited, was pronounced to be too short to belong to Bhanwari Devi, and the semen collected from it was pronounced to not match the accused. The court blamed her character by suggesting that Bhanwari Devi was an adultress.

The acquittal and subsequent protests led to an even more hostile retaliation against her. People refused to buy clay vessels from her family. Bhanwari Devi and her family were denied access to all services and resources; not even allowed to fetch water from the village. Their kids were bullied in school and they were excluded from all events and festivities. Her family asked her to make peace with her assaulters after the acquittal, but when she refused, they severed ties with her.

After the acquittal, people began to shame her and intimidate her in order to stop her from filing an appeal. In 1996, the BJP supported a rally organized by the five accused. The accused sat garlanded on a stage, as speakers accused Bhanwari Devi of lying, and insulted everyone on her side. The organizers called for Bhanwari Devi to be hanged and burnt alive. A BJP MLA Kanhya Lal Meena denounced her as a prostitute. Incited by this rally, a number of villagers attacked her once again and beat her.

In 2000, a film based on her story, Bawandar directed by Jag Mundhra was released. The film depicted the details of the case as they were, with the names of Bhanwari Devi, her husband, and the perpetrators, slightly changed. Before the release of the film, Bhanwari Devi stated that the filmmakers had not discussed the film with her. She later said that the director had promised her land and money and asked her not to allow anyone else to make a film about her. She had complied and said that although she doesn’t want money, she wanted him to help her get justice. Bhanwari Devi herself reportedly could not watch the film past the rape scenes. The film which portrayed violence committed against her without her consent and profited off of her trauma was an act of violence, often committed on Dalit-Bahujan women, whose bodily autonomy and consent is undermined in the public eye. This can also be seen in the 1994 film Bandit Queen directed by Shekhar Kapur, which depicted the rape of Phoolan Devi without her consent.

After the release of the film Bawandar, Bhanwari Devi and her family faced further humiliation and blame. Villagers would reportedly go to watch the film saying, “let’s go see Bhanwari getting raped”. Bhanwari Devi’s son, who was then a college student, was forced to leave the college. Bhanwari Dev’s son was taunted and bullied. He was called “kumhari raand ka beta” (potter whore’s son).

Later, both her sons and their wives severed ties with her as well, blaming her for the shame they had to face. Her in-laws and her brother cut ties with her after she refused to accept the monetary compensation offered by the rapists to shut down the legal case.

Bhanwari Devi awaits justice to this day. In 2018 too, Bhanwari Devi continued to face victim blame for seeking justice against her perpetrators, and was refused water from the village hand pump.