On the night of March 24, 2014, four friends, a 13-year-old girl, two 17-year-old girls, and one 18-year-old girl, from Bhagana in Haryana went to the wheat fields near their homes to relieve themselves, as they did every night. There, they were sedated and abducted by 5 men belonging to the Jat caste, who carried them off in a car and then gangraped them. The five accused were Lalit, Sumit, Dharnwir, and Sandip Panghal from Bhagana, and Parmal Panghal from Kugand in Haryana.
The victims remembered being overpowered by the men and having their mouths stuffed with handkerchiefs before losing consciousness. They regained consciousness in the Bhatinda railway station. They didn’t know where they were but from their torn clothes and bruises on their body, they knew they had been raped.
The four girls belonged to the Dhanuk caste, a Scheduled caste in Haryana. The perpetrators, Jats, are an agricultural caste which was dominant in Bhagana due to ownership of land and political power.
Dalits made up 30% of the population of the Bhagana village, and included the Chamar caste, the Dhanuk caste, and the Valmiki caste. Bhagana had seen years of caste hostility by the Jats against the Dalits. A land conflict had started in 2011, when the Jats appropriated a large part of the community land which was to be distributed by Panchayats to SC and OBC populations.
The common land of a village belonging to the village panchayat is known as the shamilat deh land. According to existing legal provisions, it is the panchayat’s responsibility to distribute this land amongst the landless farmers in the village, including the Scheduled Caste and OBC populations. There were about 280 acres of such land in Bhagana. Jat landholders were given 60 yards of land each for every acre of land they owned. However, Dalit families were made to pay 1000 rupees for getting ownership of each 60-yard plot of land. Further, the legal documents of ownership were withheld by the Panchayat. The Dalits believed that the plots of land given to them were the ones refused by the Jat landholders as they belonged to the cemetery. The Jats also took over a playground which had for years been a meeting place and community space for the Dalits, known as ‘Ambedkar Chowk’.
The Dalits protested against the unequal distribution of common land by the Panchayat by filing a case at the High Court of Punjab and Haryana. The case was dismissed by the Court as there was a separate mechanism in place for approaching higher authorities for implementation of land order. However, the Court upheld the existing provisions of land distribution. However, in retaliation, the Jats led by sarpanch Rakesh Panghal unleashed a social boycott that left the Dalits without livelihood, access to resources, healthcare, and more. Dalit women were routinely harassed by Jat men. Jat men built a culture of shame and fear in the village. Two of the victims would be harassed by youth from the dominant caste and it forced them to stay at home, and drop out of school. This is before the incident of gangrape. In 2011, 138 Dalit families were forced to flee from the village due to the constant threat of violence from the Jats. Out of the Dalit population, about 150 Dhanuk families stayed back.
It was in this context that the four Dhanuk girls were abducted and gangraped. After the four girls went missing, their families went to Panghal to ask his help in filing an FIR. Panghal the Panchayat head, laughed and dismissed their worries, terming it as an elopement, even though three of the girls were minors, and refused to file a complaint. When the families said that they would go ahead and file a missing persons complaint without his cooperation, he finally revealed that he knew about their whereabouts. He informed them that the girls were in Bhatinda.
According to the four girls, one of the five men who had raped them had been stationed to keep a watch on them while the other four had gone to get breakfast. As soon as he was informed by the sarpanch that they were coming to look for the girls, he fled. The manner in which the victims were found shows the collusion between the sarpanch and the rapists.
Rakesh Panghal along with his uncle Virendra drove members from the four families from Bhagana to Bhatinda, where the girls were. The families met their daughters in Bhatinda. Panghal and Virendra forced the families to go back via train citing lack of space. They forced the girls to go back in a car with them. On the journey back to Bhagana, the two men intimidated and threatened the girls saying that they would kill them if they told anyone what happened. They also tried to drive them to their own house, intending to marry them off to the accused, and frame the violence as a case of elopement. The victims were rescued by some men from their community on the way.
The families went to file an FIR on the same night, but the police ignored their complaints and refused to file an FIR until 200 people protested outside the station. The FIR was filed on March 25th, 2015. In the FIR, the names of panchayat leader Rakesh and his uncle Virendra were excluded even though the victims had named them in their testimony. On March 25th, 2015 after going through the trauma of being sedated, abducted, raped, and threatened, the girls were made to wait for their medical test till 1:30 AM at night at the Hisar General Hospital.
During their medical examination they were subjected to the extremely dehumanising two finger test, an unscientific method where medical professionals penetrate a rape victim’s vagina without their consent, aiming to check the “elasticity” of the vagina and give an opinion about whether the victim is “habituated to sex”. This method is not only invasive and traumatising, but is also based in victim blame, as women’s sexual history is used to discredit their testimonies of rape.
After the FIR and the medical examination, the accused were arrested on March 29 and April 1, 2014. The victims were given compensation of 1.2 lakhs each and two of them were given an additional 65,000 rupees by the state government. However, the Jats retaliated by extending their social boycott, which was earlier focused on the Chamar community, to the Dhanuks as well. The arrest of the perpetrators was of little comfort as the entire community was constantly under threat of violence and lost all forms of livelihood.
Members of the Dhanuk caste were even excluded from employment under the MGNREGA scheme. The Mahatma Gandhi Employment Guarantee Act 2005 is a social security measure to ensure the right to work, under which every household, whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work, is entitled to 100 days of wage employment.
First due to the land distribution issue, then the gangrape, and the social boycott, the Dalits of Bhagana had been protesting since 2012. The Dalits did not receive any support from the government authorities, and in fact the then-Chief Minister of Haryana, Bhupendra Singh Hooda outrightly refused to help them saying that he was a Jat first and a Chief Minister later.
Members of the Jat community of Bhagana went on record to engage in victim blaming; making efforts to jusitfy the gangrape against Dalit minors. Rakesh Panghal said that the act was ‘consensual’, and that one of the girls had an ‘illicit affair’ with one of the accused and the rape allegations were being ‘fabricated for politics’. Panghal also said that the girls cannot be trusted because they were known to have had multiple affairs. Shakti Singh, who became the sarpanch after Panghal, said that the girls went with the boys on their own and later blamed them. Many said that the Dalits were making false claims for money.
Following the rape, around 80 Dhanuk families along with the victims were forced to flee due to the threats and ostracization by the Jats, and they joined the protest camp in Jantar Mantar, Delhi where Dalits of Bhagana had been protesting since 2012. In 2015, the five accused were acquitted by a fast-track court in Hisar for lack of evidence. The victims have filed for an appeal at the Haryana High Court but no updates in the case have been reported. The Dalits of Bhagana have continued their protest and remain camped in Delhi. The last reported update, from 2019, shows that there has been no government intervention and the Jats of Bhagana have not been held accountable even today.
