Death by rape—Part 2

KHAIRLANJI— a caste atrocity

The rape and murder of two women in Khairlanji drew belated attention from the media. This was a crime against the community as a whole and a crime of identity. A Dalit family living on the edge of a village in apartheid was fighting for a piece of land that had been encroached upon by members of the upper castes in the village.

The fight for their rights led to retaliation from the upper castes. Two women were raped and murdered and this was a case that typically should have been decided under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prohibition of Atrocities) Act, 1989.

Yet, when the case was taken to court, the accused were held guilty of murder but not of rape or committing offences under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prohibition of Atrocities) Act. The dispute was personalised instead of looking at the political and social context in which it occurred.

Anand Teltumbde states that the State controlled the narrative. The legal outcome was: “The shattering atrocities were transformed into a simple crime committed in a fit of rage. The prosecution failed its brief on every front, whether in using the available hard evidence or in establishing an order of events that would have confirmed a history of caste abuse preceding the crime, or unearthing the crime that the revenge executed in a ghastly manner for defying the writ of the powerful had a clear caste context.

“The crime was far from being preceded, it was merely the latest in a series of similar atrocities, and the neglect of this context could only have been deliberate.”

Here again, we see not only the context being erased, but the very law which was intended to meet such a situation of discrimination and atrocity based on caste being erased. The allegations that the women were paraded naked and that the men had their genitals cut off sounded like an exaggeration to the judges, though these very acts find a place in the definition of “atrocity” in the Act. This was unbelievable.

Kathua

The 2018 gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim tribal girl in Jammu and Kashmir revealed the deep intersection of communal tensions and sexual violence.

The crime was meticulously planned— she was drugged and raped multiple times in a temple, with evidence such as traces of her hair recovered from the site. Delegations of Hindus supporting the accused disrupted proceedings, even blocking the filing of the chargesheet, prompting the Supreme Court to shift the trial to Punjab.