#ReportingToRemember the Bhiwani & Rohtak police, the Bhiwani upper caste community, and the Rohtak court for denying & delaying justice to a young Dalit woman who was raped.

On July 13, 2016, a 21-year-old Dalit woman was found unconscious in the Sukhpura Chowk area of Rohtak, Haryana. A masters student at Rohtak’s Maharshi Dayanand University, she was abducted from near her college, drugged, gangraped, and left to die in the bushes. For her, this brought back the horror of similar violence she had faced just three years ago, in 2013.

According to the victim’s mother, she was first gangraped in Bhiwani by five men on October 18 in 2013. The five men were Mausam Kumar, Amit, and Raju alias Jagmohan, who were Jats, along with Akash and Sandeep Kumar, who were Dalits. The rapists videographed the rape and threatened to release the video online. According to some reports, they had drugged her before raping her. They forced her to meet them again after four days, on October 22, 2013. They threatened to release the videos if she did not meet them. When she went to meet them, they gangraped her again. After the five men raped her in Bhiwani in 2013, two of them, Amit and Jagmohan were arrested and released on bail while the other three were never arrested. According to the victim’s brother, the police did not investigate the case properly and they were made to go from station to station in pursuing the case.

While the young woman’s family filed a case for their re-arrest and continued to seek justice, they were faced with social ostracization and shaming, as well as threats to their safety from the accused. The accused were allegedly pressuring them to agree to an out-of-court settlement of 50 lakh Rupees. Social ostracization and victim blame forced the family to move to Rohtak from Bhiwani.

The kin of the accused claimed that she was lying and blamed her of playing ‘the Dalit card’. Phrases such as this, which frame marginalization as an advantage to be used by a victim for their benefit, are a form of victim blame, aimed at discrediting a victim due to their caste.

According to her mother, she lapsed into severe depression in the years following the violence and dropped out of college. Eventually she re-enrolled in college in 2015. On July 13, 2016, she had stepped out of her college at 1:30 pm and did not return home. She was found unconscious in some bushes at 6:30 pm. She reported being abducted into a car, choked and slapped, then being drugged. She said that she regained consciousness to find that her pants had been taken off, after which she lost consciousness again. She woke up when they choked her and threw her out of a car.

She reported that the five men who raped her in 2016 were the same as the men who had raped her in 2013. Three of them, Amit, Jagmohan, and Sandeep were arrested by the police while Mausam and Akash were absconding. The accused reportedly produced alibi through CCTV footage and phone records to show that they were not in Rohtak on the day of the rape.

The police arrested two other men, Sandeep Hooda and Pramod Kumar, who were unrelated to the 2013 case. Their castes were not reported, though Hooda is a surname used by Jats. The police claimed that they had been seen with the victim in the CCTV footage of a local hotel on the day of the rape. Without confirming the version of the events narrated to the police by the two men, the police shared their account with the media. This was done without informing or cross-checking with the victim. The police told the media that according to the two men, the victim had called Sandeep Hooda to her college where he went with Pramod. After this, they went to the hotel where Pramod and the victim had a few drinks and consensual sex, before he left her in an inebriated state.

These statements made by the police to the media are intended to bring the public eye to question the ‘character’ of the victim and to justify violence against her through victim blame.

The victim and her family found out about this statement through the newspapers. They maintained that she had been raped by the five men who had raped her in 2013. The victim had threatened to commit suicide to demand that the case be transferred from the Special Investigation Team of the Haryana Police to the Central Bureau of Investigations as she did not believe the investigation to be fair. However, no such transfer was reported and in October, 2016, a local court in Rohtak ordered the release of all five men. These included Amit, Jagmohan and Sandeep, whom the victim had accused of raping her twice, in 2013 and 2016. The other two were Sandeep Hooda and Pramod Kumar, whom she did not accuse of rape and hence did not give a statement on.

After going through the trauma of rape and failure of justice twice, the victim and her family did not feel safe in her continuing her education. In 2017, they said that they did not feel safe anywhere in Haryana anymore and wanted to move away. The victim’s family moved an application in the Punjab and Haryana High Court to seek transfer of the case to the CBI, but no updates in the case have been reported after that.

The victim, who maintained throughout the case that the rapists in 2016 were the same five men as 2013, awaits justice. This case shows the negligence of the police and the justice system, which failed to recognize the abuse of power of the five men. In spite of reporting that she was drugged during both the rapes, discrepancies in her accounts were taken as grounds for the rapists’ release.

Lawyer and activist Vrinda Grover said to The Wire,

“We cannot see this rape in isolation. Nor can we simply see it as the rape of a woman. We have to look at it in the context of caste atrocities that are committed. When caste and patriarchy join hands, this is the lethal consequence of that. The victim’s access to justice is obstructed not only because she is a woman, but it is almost impossible because of her caste. Incidents of atrocity are also increasing because Dalit women are asserting themselves. Like in this case, reports say the men said they were ‘punishing’ her because she refused to compromise. She was questioning their complete control over the bodies of Dalit women, which has traditionally been how caste has worked. She asserted her right to justice. The non-inclusion of the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act in the first case is in itself a big problem. It shows how the system continues to be blind to the caste element in these rape cases.”

A pattern of police negligence and inaccessibility of justice enabled the five men who raped the victim in 2013 to continue to abuse their power to intimidate and punish her. The conclusion of this intimidation for not complying with their narrative and asserting her testimony was the punishment of rape.