Parking the vehicles near the bridge, the men descended the stairs down to the water using their phones to light their way. The Shakya brothers shouldered the children’s bodies.
Over the years, thousands of corpses had been burned at the water’s edge, their ashes scattered to transport the souls to heaven. The last member of the Shakya family cremated here was Sohan Lal’s father, Zorawar. The girls were the first in the family to be buried here.
The rituals that followed were laden with anxiety. The police were afraid that the brothers would change their minds. The brothers were worried about breaking religious rules which warned against conducting last rites after sundown. To avoid yet another delay, the police worked quickly, bringing in priests from a temple that was tucked under the bridge. At the same time, they wanted to be sure that the bodies wouldn’t be tampered with.
‘Villagers normally bury bodies close to the surface – in the process, attracting wild animals from the nearby jungle,’ Chauhan, the superintendent of police, later said. ‘In this case, we took precautions and dug deeper graves.’ It wasn’t just wild animals that Chauhan was worried about, of course.
The Shakya brothers chose a spot near a small, blue-skinned statue of Shiva, the Lord of Destruction, who was said to meditate among the ashes of corpses. They pitched in with spades, digging out a cocoon of sand that was three feet wide and six feet deep. They lowered their girls and covered them with the clothes their mothers had chosen. Everyone bowed their heads in prayer.
With this, the hydra of vehicles split. The politician Sinod Kumar went back to his palatial home. The journalists went to hotels. Tomorrow, they would be back in the village.
Inspector Ganga Singh went to Jati, somehow expecting to find Pappu’s family waiting for him.
And the Shakya brothers returned home to Katra.
When they arrived, they found the courtyard teeming with so many relatives who had come from faraway places to express their condolences that some had to be sent up to the roof to pass the night. The men locked the courtyard doors behind them – and people may indeed have slept. But when the sun rose, Sohan Lal and Jeevan Lal were awake.
Siya Devi was on the ground, her legs stretched out before her. She hadn’t changed her sari. She hadn’t eaten. And for the first time in her life she wasn’t attuned to the needs of men. She didn’t look once in their direction.
She looked up, instead, at the light breaking through the darkness, bringing with it a new day and, for her, a new way of living.
64 200 tonnes of half-burnt human flesh: ft.com/content/dadfae24-b23e-11e4-b380-00144feab7de
Kharif
Summer, 2014
The Worst Place in the World
Within the week everyone had heard of Katra, where children were said to be raped and killed. The village continued to attract curiosity-seekers from faraway places. Hundreds of police officers were deployed to monitor the situation. Their schedule was so relentless they set up charpoys in vacant animal shelters. They bathed at handpumps. Some families took pity on them and sent over fresh milk from their cows. The village children hung around, hoping to catch a glimpse of a real gun, something that wasn’t made from spare parts.
The international media quickly picked up the story, which they projected as the most high-profile rape and murder in India since the 2012 Delhi bus rape. The New York Times led with ‘Rapes in India Fuel Charges of Conspiracy by a Caste’.65 The Huffington Post showed the girls’ hanging bodies with a trigger warning.66 Even the UN Secretary-General took note. Speaking of ‘despicable acts across the world’, Ban Ki-moon said, ‘I was especially appalled by the brutal rape and gruesome murder of two teenaged women in India who had ventured out because they did not have access to a toilet.’67
But if the Delhi bus rape was met with horror, the hangings in Budaun were reflected on with despair.
The story of the girls’ lives and deaths, as it was understood at the time, was the story of India’s most persistent troubles. The country was so unsafe, immoral even, children were raped. While economic development had transformed many lives, caste rules were still followed. The police were poorly trained and thoroughly compromised. There were no toilets even just a few hours outside the national capital.
India, which in recent years was viewed through the prism of economic success, was now diagnosed in terms of a systemic social failure – the inability to protect women and children. The laws implemented in the wake of the Delhi bus rape had clearly not proved enough of a deterrent. The country had already been declared the worst place among the Group of 20 to be a woman, worse even than Saudi Arabia where women lived under strict male guardianship laws.68 The deaths of Padma and Lalli confirmed the appropriateness of this low ranking. ‘India is incredibly poor, Saudi Arabia is very rich. But there is a commonality and that is that unless you have some special access to privilege, you have a very different future, depending on whether you have an extra X chromosome, or a Y chromosome,’ said an analyst.69
The media attention drew more politicians than even the Shakyas had hoped for. Although the prime minister stayed away, more than half a dozen of the country’s most powerful people visited the family. Together they represented all the major parties – including the party in power at the centre and the party in control of the state.
With the politicians came handlers, bureaucrats and elite protection units. And with them also came the drama.
The Shakyas’ favourite politician Mayawati was scheduled to visit on 1 June. Everyone was eager to see the remarkable Dalit leader in person.
Ahead of her visit, hundreds of volunteers from her political party descended on the village to get preparations under way. They brought an electricity generator, an air-conditioner and cartons of bottled water. They stacked these items, which most of the villagers had never used, in an enormous tent that they had pitched for Mayawati to relax in. Would she walk over to the Shakya house, people wondered. Probably not. They would have to come to her.
Then the volunteers appropriated a farmer’s plot for a helipad and, not wanting to get their clothes dirty, they rounded up some children to dig the earth and smooth it with their bare hands. The police stood nearby and watched.70
Cable news channels were aghast. ‘The same politicians who make laws against child labour also make small, small children work for them,’71 said a studio anchor.
Mayawati wasn’t the first high-profile politician to arrive here, and there were already barricades in place to protect the leaders from the surging crowds – many of whom had voted for them. White Ambassador cars topped with cherry-red beacons zoomed in and out of the fields with advance teams. The villagers, now separated from their land, and work, had to watch from a far distance as if they were the outsiders.
When the politician’s Bell 429 appeared in the sky, the enormous crowd of waiting villagers tipped their faces up in awe. Hovering above their mint, their tobacco, the tornado of blue and white metal whipped up the dust and rocked the trees, sending monkeys jumping helter-skelter. It was an extraordinary sight. But then these were extraordinary times.
As soon as Mayawati landed, the crowd pitched forward past the barricades like she was a rock star they had to get a glimpse of. Her enormous team of machine-gun-toting security officers kept the villagers at bay, but it was impossible to hear a word of what she was saying, so Mayawati would have to walk after all. The tiny, crop-haired politician in her stiff, cream-coloured salwar kameez, socks and sandals, proceeded to the Shakya house where she settled herself on a chair. The bereaved family members crouched on their haunches with their hands folded pleadingly before her. ‘Criminal-type people won’t be spared,’ she told them, without going into details.
Then she walked over to the orchard, the scene of the alleged crime, to hold a press conference. The police, she said, had attempted to pin the blame on the parents. ‘They tried to defame the girls
and to protect the culprits.’72
There isn’t law and order in Uttar Pradesh, there isn’t governance, there is only ‘jungle raj’, she said,73 invoking another commonly used phrase to describe the leadership of the Yadav government. She told the gathered press that when her Bahujan Samaj Party came back to power, she would deliver justice to the Shakyas.
Questioned about the preparations earlier in the day, a party representative said, ‘The children were just playing in the mud.’
Mayawati left, never to be seen in the village again. But anticipation of the next high-profile arrival kept the television cameras and crews rooted to the fields.
Sensing an opportunity, desperate petitioners now started to appear in the village. The state had failed them, the police did nothing, perhaps the people from Delhi would be interested to know.
One mother told a reporter that it had been a month since her daughter had disappeared. ‘Yadav boys took her,’ she said tearfully. ‘They took my darling.’74 Another parent also blamed the Yadavs for the disappearance of his child. He even knew who the culprits were, he said, but when he had approached the police, the station head told him, ‘the Yadavs will bring her back. Why don’t you just go home.’ ‘I don’t know whether she’s dead or alive,’ the father said.
Soon, so many complaints of missing girls started to circulate in the Katra fields that it was difficult to make sense of what was happening.
One place to look was the police. The Indian force was among the most understaffed in the world. The average police officer-to-citizen ratio was 144 to 100,000 against the United Nations’ recommendation of 222 to 100,000.75 In Uttar Pradesh, there were fewer than 100 police for 100,000 people. Here, the police functioned at 48.1 per cent of its capacity.76
The obvious answer was to expand the force, but the process was so cumbersome that even interested candidates drifted away. A recruitment drive was announced in 2013, but the subsequent selection would take two years and eight months to complete.77
Then, according to the activist group Common Cause, the state spent on average just a little over 1 per cent of its total police expenditure on training new recruits.78 For comparison’s sake, New Delhi, the national capital, spent 2.49 per cent – the most in India, but still a very small amount. The police stations in Uttar Pradesh also lacked basic communications infrastructure such as phones, wireless devices and two-wheelers.
Even if the state police came up to its required strength, it couldn’t keep up with the rapidly expanding population. And, as long as politicians with criminal records continued to occupy major posts in the government, nothing would change. They were hardly likely to vote for more efficient policing.
Rather than fixing these problems, successive governments had quietly declared the situation beyond help. Since they couldn’t control crime, they controlled the number of reported crimes. Police officers spoke of a ‘blanket ban’ and ‘monthly maximum quotas’ to keep crime statistics low, allowing the party in power to boast that they were at least doing better than their predecessors.
And yet, thousands of girls were reported kidnapped or abducted in Uttar Pradesh in 2014. Some were taken for ransom, others were murdered. There were 7,338 cases of kidnapping and abduction just for ‘marriage’ according to the National Crime Records Bureau.79 Across the country this figure stood at more than 30,000. In fact, ‘marriage’ accounted for about 40 per cent of all cases of kidnappings and abductions in India in 2014.80 In comparison, eighty-three men were reported to have been abducted for marriage that year.
At the same time, anecdotal data showed that some reported crimes weren’t crimes at all. The taboo around marrying against a parent’s will was still so prevalent that parents of young women who had eloped chose to allege that they had been abducted for marriage. Similar reactions followed when parents learned that their daughters were having premarital sex. They filed charges of rape to protect the family’s honour. Indeed, the taboo against premarital sex was greater than the stigma of rape.
Although the police appeared to find it difficult to distinguish between real kidnappings and attempts to protect honour, there was no doubt that crimes against women were ubiquitous. And that a failure to investigate such crimes emboldened others to commit similar ones, allowing the cycle to continue. The more such crimes occurred the less likely they were to interest the media, which meant that politicians and the police had less incentive to do their job.
In fact, around the time of Padma and Lalli’s deaths, there were stories of several other disturbing incidents. The morning after the girls were buried, a teenager in Azamgarh, another part of the state, was gang-raped in a field.81 Two weeks later, a forty-five-year-old woman was found dangling in a tree by a corner of her own sari.82 The day after, the body of yet another teenaged girl was found in yet another tree.83
In each case, grieving family members posited one theory, the police another; a post-mortem carried out in the standard fashion was inconclusive, and the matter was closed as though it had never happened in the first place.
65 ‘Conspiracy by a Caste’: Gardiner Harris and Hari Kumar, ‘Rapes in India Fuel Charges of Conspiracy by a Caste’, New York Times, 29 May 2014, nytimes.com/2014/05/30/world/asia/in-india-rape-and-murder-allegations-of-a-caste-conspiracy.html
66 ‘extremely graphic images’: huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/05/29/gang-rape-teen-india_n_5411634.html
67 ‘did not have access to a toilet’: hindustantimes.com/india/un-chief-ban-ki-moon-slams-Budaun-gang-rapes/story-EhFYtPbgFpFNhQnpjD6BtJ.html
68 the worst place … to be a woman: in.reuters.com/article/g20-women/canada-best-g20-country-to-be-a-woman-india-worst-idINDEE85C00420120613
69 Ibid.
70 The police stood nearby and watched: youtube.com/watch?v=k7fApfVIyhg
71 ‘The same politicians who make laws against child labour’: youtube.com/watch?v=k7fApfVIyhg/; indiatoday.in/india/north/story/mayawati-Budaun-visit-children-working-helipad-samajwadi-party-195259-2014-06-01
72 ‘They tried to defame the girls and protect the culprits’: youtube.com/watch?v=3CFsz4DlRVk
73 only ‘jungle raj’: ibid.
74 https://www.ndtv.com/video/news/news/badaun-gang-rape-am-i-not-a-citizen-of-india-father-of-girl-asks-samajwadi-mp-323851
75 police officer to citizen ratio: livemint.com/news/india/india-s-police-force-among-the-world-s-weakest-1560925355383.html
76 the police functioned at 48.1 per cent of its capacity: commoncause.in/uploadimage/page/Status_of_Policing_in_India_Report_2019_by_Common_Cause_and_CSDS.pdf
77 A recruitment drive was announced: ibid.
78 1 per cent … on training new recruits: ibid.
79 7,338 cases of kidnapping and abduction: ncrb.gov.in/sites/default/files/crime_in_india_table_additional_table_chapter_reports/Chapter%205_2014.pdf
80 ‘marriage’ accounted for about 40 per cent: blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/08/20/abduction-of-women-for-marriage-is-on-the-rise-in-india/
81 a teenager … was gang-raped: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Girl-gang-raped-in-UPs-Azamgarh-district/articleshow/35777331.cms
82 found dangling in a tree: indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/another-woman-found-hanging-from-tree-in-up-gangrape-suspected/
83 the body of yet another teenaged girl: Malavika Vyawahare, ‘Another Case of Hanging in Indian State’, New York Times, 12 June 2014, nytimes.com/2014/06/13/world/asia/in-india-another-woman-is-hanged-from-tree.html
The Women Who Changed India
What the political response to Katra made clear was that only public protests forced politicians to react. Moreover, a great deal depended on the extent to which the media amplified the incident. And the interest of the media was naturally influenced by whether the crime would in
terest their audience.
In 2012, the year of the Delhi bus rape, there were nearly 25,000 rapes reported in India.84 Fear of social stigma and of the police, as well as a lack of trust in the justice system due to long trials and low conviction rates – around 27 per cent according to latest figures85 – meant that sexual assault was severely under-reported. The National Family Health Survey 2015-2016, a detailed, multi-round exercise conducted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, estimated that 79 per cent of women who experienced sexual violence, including rape, didn’t tell anyone about the fact.86 The financial newspaper Mint used this data, as well as data from crimes recorded by the police and compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau to estimate that, in fact, 99.1 per cent cases of sexual violence were not reported.87
The Delhi bus rape, according to a study conducted at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, drew the media for several reasons: ‘the victim was a student, she had been to an upmarket shopping mall before she was attacked, and she had also just watched an English-language movie. These factors marked her out as a middle- or upper-class Indian woman, which in turn made her story more compelling for the wealthy, urban readership of India’s English-language press.’88
The Good Girls Page 13