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Fearless Freedom

Page 17

by Kavita Krishnan


  Four years later, a judicial commission established that the villagers were right. Meena had been raped and murdered, and the killing had then been staged as an encounter. The commission noted that ‘blood clots were found in her lungs and intestines on account of cuts. The seventh rib is fractured. This shows that intercourse was done using physical force on Ms Meena Khalko.’18

  Soon after Meena’s death (long before the judicial commission submitted its findings vindicating Meena), the state government had repeated a familiar script in the state assembly to maintain that Meena was killed in an encounter. When opposition leaders had alleged that Meena had been raped and killed, the state’s home minister, Nankiram Kanwar, of the BJP, asked why Meena had left home in the evening: girls who do not stay home in the evenings are bad girls, everyone knows that! He added, for good measure, that the forensic report indicated that Meena was ‘habitual at sex’.19

  It was not the first time an Adivasi girl’s rape by policemen was being dismissed with the insinuation that she was habituated to sex and that her sexual autonomy and mobility provided an alibi for the accused. In 1972, another Adivasi teenager, Mathura, had been raped by a policeman at a police station. An infamous 1978 Supreme Court verdict upheld the sessions court’s finding that Mathura was a ‘shocking liar’: a two-finger test20 had claimed her to be ‘habituated to sex’, so the courts assumed she must have consented to sex with the policeman.21 This judgment was challenged by an open letter to the chief justice of India by four professors of law, sparking off a sustained feminist movement that demanded, and won, some improvements in the rape law’s understanding of consent.22

  Meena Khalko’s story reminds us that for Adivasi teenagers raped by policemen, their sexual history and their mobility and autonomy continue to be used to justify their rape by the police. Kanwar’s remarks in the Chhattisgarh Assembly implied that a girl who could tell her parents she was bicycling off to meet her friend, who was friends with a truck driver, could not ever be raped. A girl who is habituated to sex must also be habitually anti-national: how outrageous to accuse the ‘nationalist’ police force in a conflict area, fighting for Mother India, of raping a Naxal slut who was anyway habituated to sex?

  In the Sangh’s and BJP’s political imagination, women’s sexual autonomy is often linked with being anti-national. This is why a ‘dossier’ on the ‘anti-national’ activities supposedly rife on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus displayed an obsessive and prurient fascination for the sex lives of the students. It is why, in television debates (ironically, on sexual harassment) and on Twitter, BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy has repeatedly resorted to dissing my arguments by proclaiming that I am a ‘Marxist–Leninist/Naxalite who has free sex’.23 A JNU faculty member offered an insight into why sexual autonomy is seen by the Sangh as anti-national:

  By not incarcerating women, by having a GSCASH, by relentlessly struggling for a gender-plural campus free of surveillance and policing, universities like JNU challenge not only patriarchy, but also its chief clients: caste and exclusionary religion. It should therefore be no surprise to any student as to why from the Sanghistanian perspective, at least some normal young people look like they have already seceded from a nation built on the hegemonies of caste [Brahminism], religion [Hinduism] and gender [antiquated Male, size 56].24

  But while JNU students and those like me can laugh off this Sanghi fear of sexually and politically ‘free’ women, this political imagination has far more grim consequences for girls and women in conflict areas, like Meena Khalko.

  Buddheshwar and Guttiyari have had to suffer the pain of their daughter being raped and killed—and then having the home minister dignify her assailants as nationalists and demean her as an anti-national slut. Buddheshwar, speaking to a journalist, said, ‘Humri dil ko bahut kadta hai [It hurts my heart a lot].’ Stretching his hands a foot apart, he said, ‘My heart was once this big,’ adding, ‘it’s this small now,’ with his fingers an inch apart.25

  ‘Beti Bachao’—from ‘Security Forces’?

  Meena Khalko’s story is by no means an exception. In a conflict area like Bastar, such experiences are the norm. Even the daily work and play of girls and boys in this region are fraught with the danger of arbitrary arrest or custodial killing.

  In 2015, for instance, three Adivasi women, Somdi, Gangi and Lakme filed a complaint with a magistrate about their teenage daughters being chased, beaten, made to march 21 km away and then illegally detained overnight. The three girls had left home together to graze their buffaloes and bathe in the river, just a kilometre away from their village. When they spotted a large group of police and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) men emerging from the nearby forest, they turned around and ran back home. The men from the special task force of Chhattisgarh police and the CRPF chased them into their homes, dragged them out, beat them up and made them walk for eight hours to the Kukanar police station 21 km away where they were detained overnight. Their mothers and aunts who tried to follow them and ask the police why they were being taken away, were beaten black and blue. The girls were produced before a magistrate the next day and kept in an observation home 400 km away.

  The police interpreted the girls’ presence in the open spaces, and their response of fleeing at the sight of the police as a suspicious sign of their guilt, saying, ‘Why did the girls run? Obviously, they were guilty of something. Why were they in the forest? Only “sandigdh log” [suspicious persons] roam around in the forest.’26

  In 2016, I was a part of a fact-finding team that visited Bastar. We broke up into groups and visited remote villages, following up on newspaper reports of encounter killings.27

  A news item in the Dainik Bhaskar28 dated 31 January 2016, with the headline ‘Two Fleeing Naxalites Fall in Ditch, Killed by Police’, quoted the police as claiming that two armed women Maoists, Vanjam Shanti and Siriyam Pojje, were killed when they fell into a ditch during an hour-long gun battle on 30 January 2016. The newspaper carried a photograph of the bodies, which gave every appearance of the two being very young girls, dressed not in Maoist uniforms but saris. Members of our team visited Palamadgu village in Dornapal tehsil, Sukma district, where the encounter had supposedly taken place. The team found that Shanti was thirteen years old and Pojje, fourteen. They were teenagers, not adult women and let alone armed Maoists. One of our team members who had made it to this village said that Vanjam Aade, mother of Shanti, could barely speak through her tears. She said that Shanti and Pojje had gone early that morning to release the hens (who were kept cooped up at night to safeguard them from wild animals) and then have a bath in the river. This was what the girls did each morning. And at 8 a.m., Aade was told by villagers that her daughter had been shot dead.29

  And it is not only girls whose lives are in such danger in Bastar; young boys and men are also very vulnerable to completely unprovoked attacks, arrests and even murder at the hands of ‘security’ forces. At Arlampalli village in Sukma on 3 November 2015, three friends, Vetti Lacchu (nineteen), Sodhi Muya (twenty-one) and Dudhi Bhima (twenty-three), had done what young men do—go out for a drink together. As they headed back, they were accosted by the police and beaten up. As one of them fled, he was shot dead, and the other two were made to carry the body of their friend to a pick-up van, after which they too were shot dead. All three were later branded ‘Maoists’.30

  Herding goats and buffaloes, going to meet a boyfriend, having a bath in the river, hanging out with friends, dancing at a harvest festival—for Bastar’s kids, these comfortingly ordinary everyday things are done under the shadow of the police and paramilitary guns; and for Bastar’s parents, the fear of losing a child to arbitrary violence is a constant companion.

  The Mothers of Manipur

  In July 2004, twelve Manipuri women turned mothers’ hurt and rage into a new and raw kind of political protest. These women, calling themselves ‘imas’ (mothers), assembled in a flash protest outside the Assam Rifles headquarters at Kangla Fort in Manipur. St
ripping themselves naked, they held up a banner that challenged the Indian armed forces: ‘Indian Army Rape Us.’ With furious tears in their eyes, their voices cracking, they shouted, ‘We are all Manorama’s mothers, come, rape us!’ And ‘Down with AFSPA!’ People watching them at the spot and later on local television channels, could not restrain their tears. All of Manipur erupted in sustained protest demanding the scrapping of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA).

  Who was Manorama? What is the AFSPA? What had made these mothers of Manipur issue a challenge that was at such odds with the romanticized myth of chivalrous armed forces protecting Mother India?

  Five days before the protest, a paramilitary contingent, the 17th Assam Rifles, barged into the east Imphal home of a young Manipuri woman, Thangjam Manorama. They dragged her into the courtyard, tortured and molested her, and took her away with them claiming she was a militant. Two hours later, they claimed they had had to shoot at her legs to prevent her from escaping, and that she died of her injuries.

  The problem with this tale was that there were bullet holes in Manorama’s genitals, and her body bore the unmistakable signs of torture. Her mother and brothers testified to the fact that she had been molested and tortured in their own home before she was taken away. When women saw Manorama’s body, brutalized, they felt impelled to do something out of the ordinary to protest. Many of these women had been active in meira paibi (women torchbearer) groups that had mobilized on various social issues in Manipur. Keeping their plan a secret even from their own family members, these women went to the Kangla Fort wearing nothing but their outer garments, which they then stripped off in protest.

  The mothers of Manipur were not protesting just that one act of rape and murder: they were challenging the draconian AFSPA, which ensures that armed forces cannot be prosecuted for murder on the pretext that any violence by such forces must be presumed to be ‘in pursuit of their duty’. It was this Act, they felt, which emboldened the armed forces in Manipur to rape and kill with the confidence that there would be no consequences. When rape and murder are cloaked in the uniforms of ‘nationalism’, when Indian nationalism is made to feel like an oppressive colonial occupation that treats entire nationalities worse than prisoners of war, is it any surprise at all that women protesting it feel repelled by that nationalism? Ima Nganbi, one of the twelve women who participated in the naked protest, said she remembers celebrating India’s independence day as a child, but no longer wants to sing the national anthem, or stand up, when it is played.31

  Under pressure from the protests in Manipur, the state government set up a judicial commission headed by C. Upendra Singh, retired district and sessions judge, in 2004, to probe Manorama’s killing. The commission completed its probe in November 2004, despite unceasing obstructions from the Assam Rifles, which claimed that the AFSPA shielded it from any such probe. The Assam Rifles and the Central government have consistently blocked every attempt to act on the findings and recommendations of the Justice Upendra Commission.

  The Justice Upendra Commission concluded without any room for doubt that Manorama had been subjected to ‘brutal and merciless torture’ by the 17th Assam Rifles personnel.32 With Manorama ‘clutching on to her mother, Khumanleima’, she was dragged out to the verandah screaming ‘Ima, Ima, Khamu (mother, mother, please stop them)’.33 Manorama’s brother, Basu, had seen his sister subjected to waterboarding torture. He also saw a member of the arresting party inserting a kitchen knife under his sister’s underwear, pulling down her phanek (skirt) and pulling up her T-shirt to expose her body. Later, she was made to change her clothes before being taken away by the contingent.

  The Commission concluded that:

  The contention of the Assam Rifles that victim Manorama was shot at her legs while she was running in order to escape from the custody of the 17th Assam Rifles is a naked lie . . . most of the injuries reveal that they were shot while the victim was in prone, while lying, bending positions with an intention to kill and even after she was in helpless condition.34

  It also concluded that:

  The evidence and circumstances clearly indicate that victim Manorama might have been subject to rape and sexual harassment. The arresting team of the Assam Rifles with a view to cover up the crime over the person of the victim, had specifically fired on genital organ . . . this aspect exposes not only barbaric attitude but also their attempt to fabricate false evidence with a view to cover up the offence committed by them.35

  Why are the voices of the mothers of Manipur silenced in the name of honouring Mother India? If Jyoti Singh Pandey, brutally raped and killed on a bus in Delhi in 2012, could be seen as ‘India’s daughter’, why is Thangjam Manorama, victim of a far more cold-blooded, planned, ruthless rape and murder, not seen as India’s daughter? Why do only Manipur’s meira paibis see her as their daughter?

  In 2004, I visited Manipur not long after the anti-AFSPA agitation. I recall that when we met Khumanleima, she would not even meet our eyes. Her grief and shock were so great that she could not even respond to anyone’s words or gestures. The meira paibi became the voice for the pain that Manorama’s own mother could not then express.

  There is something else I remember from that visit. On 6 October 2004, we landed in Imphal airport, to realize that the ‘godman’ Sri Sri Ravishankar (of the ‘Art of Living’ fame) had travelled on the same flight as us. His stated purpose, we learned, was to bring ‘peace’ to Manipur. I recall my shock at seeing him greeted at the airport and escorted by a team of Assam Rifles personnel—the same Assam Rifles that was defending its men accused of raping and murdering Manorama. During his visit, Ravishankar preached ‘peace’ to Manipur’s protesting people—but never visited Manorama’s mother or asked the Central government why it was allowing the Assam Rifles to practise the ‘art of killing and raping’. He seemed to be brokering a ‘peace’ divorced from justice, as an agent of the force responsible for the violence and the impunity.

  I ended my report36 on that visit to Manipur by recalling the Manipuri play Draupadi by the renowned playwright of Manipur, Ojas Heisnam Kanhailal. That play was in turn inspired by the central character in Mahasweta Devi’s story ‘Dopdi’, a Santhal woman who is picked up as a ‘Naxalite’ and raped by the police. Instead of being browbeaten, however, Dopdi confronts her oppressors, naked and bleeding, and challenges them to ‘counter (encounter) me’, even as they are struck with fear at her challenge. Kanhailal’s play had been performed since the year 2000, and actress Sabitri Heisnam, in its final scenes, would disrobe on stage, asking the rapist soldiers to ‘counter’ her. Through that play, fiction seemed to have anticipated fact. Like Mahasweta’s Dopdi and Kanhailal’s Draupadi, these mothers of Manipur defiantly disrobed themselves—and in the process, pulled the patriotic robes off the atrocities by the armed forces.

  Parents in Eternal Limbo

  Rajan’s parents, waiting endlessly to know what happened to their son, became the emblem of the Emergency. In Kashmir, there are literally thousands of such parents, waiting in vain for word of their sons, abducted by the armed forces.

  One such parent is Parveena Ahanger. I met her in November 2016, when I visited the Kashmir Valley as part of a solidarity team with members from people’s movements all over India. She told us the story she has repeated many times over for nearly three decades. Her son, Javaid Ahmad, was a student of Class XI in 1990 when he was picked up by paramilitary forces from Batamaloo. ‘I kept waiting for him to return, thinking he’s innocent, they can’t keep him for long, they will question him and then let him go,’ she said. Then, she approached the courts, then politicians and the government—to no avail. She then began keeping clippings from a newspaper that would print lists of ‘disappeared’ persons. For years, she travelled the length and breadth of the Valley, visiting remote villages to track down other parents of persons who had disappeared after being picked up by the Indian military and paramilitary forces. That was how she formed the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons
(APDP)—a platform of Kashmiri parents of people who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Parveena told us that for her and other parents like her, life was like living forever in a limbo, never knowing if their beloved sons (or brothers or husbands) were alive or dead. Once or twice every month, these parents gather at Parveena’s home, and then march from there to hold some kind of protest demonstration—defying the prohibitions on almost every kind of protest, however peaceful and however small in the Valley.

  According to Parveena, at least 8000 people in Kashmir are estimated to have disappeared after being picked up by Indian forces. What happened to these people? In 2009, human rights groups, including the APDP, prepared a report on 2700 ‘unknown, unmarked, and mass graves’ in fifty-five villages in three districts—Bandipora, Baramulla and Kupwara—of north Kashmir. Most of the graves contained unnamed bodies, and a large number of graves contained multiple (more than one, and in some cases up to seventeen) bodies.37 The APDP and other rights groups believe that most of the bodies in the mass graves are of victims of disappearances and custodial killings. When people picked up by the forces die in custody, they are buried in unmarked graves, without taking the trouble to inform their parents, so that the custodial force can be spared any explanations. The State Human Rights Commission of Kashmir ordered a DNA probe into the mass graves in 2017—but the parents are still waiting for this order to be followed. A woman whose husband disappeared in 2002 told a journalist that she and others like her wanted ‘emotional closure’: ‘We want to know whether our family members are buried in these graves. At least, we will get an address to mourn.’38

 

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