Hindu Nagar - When the young woman
limped toward shopkeeper Ravindra Prakash, pleading for help on
a dark and foggy morning in the northern Indian village, her
body was so charred that he thought she was a witch. He grabbed
a wooden stick and tried to shoo her away.
As she came closer, under the dim light of his shop, it took
Prakash a few minutes to realise she was from his village, Hindu
Nagar, in India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh.
He called the police. In a shaky voice, the 23-year-old
woman narrated her ordeal to an official on the other line. She
said she had been beaten and set ablaze in nearby fields by five
men from her village - including two she had accused of having
raped her last year.
That morning of December 5, the woman had set out early to catch
a train that was due to depart around 5 am to meet her lawyer to
pursue her rape case, according to her statement in a police
report. After she was burnt, the government ordered her moved to
a hospital in New Delhi, where she succumbed to her injuries
late on December 6.
While her death has sparked nationwide outrage, her village
stands divided over it, largely over caste lines.
The woman belonged to a lower caste of blacksmiths. The five
men accused of her murder are from Hindu Nagar's dominant
landowning caste. Many upper-caste villagers defended the men
and questioned the woman's character, some dismissing her death
as a love affair gone wrong. Others accused her of falsely
trying to implicate the men, whose families insisted on their
innocence.
"She had big plans for herself," said her father, who makes
chisels, shovels and other farm tools on a road outside the
village. Sitting with his head bowed on a chair outside his mud
home, as villagers gathered around to watch, he said: "I want
justice for my daughter. I want her killers hanged."
Reuters is withholding the name of the woman and her family
members because India's Supreme Court bars revealing the
identity of sexual assault victims, including through their
families.
The divisions in Hindu Nagar, a village of roughly 2,000
people surrounded partly by yellow mustard fields, illustrate
India's challenge in addressing a rape problem that women's
rights groups say is common across the country, particularly in
rural areas. A rape occurs every 20 minutes, on average, in the
country of 1.3 billion people, according to federal data.
The brutal gang rape and murder of a young physiotherapist
on a Delhi bus in 2012 provoked such widespread revulsion that
India enacted some of the world's toughest anti-rape laws,
including the death penalty in some cases.
But it has had little impact, women's rights experts say.
Cases are reported, but government data shows that conviction
rates are low.
In another attack this month, a 27-year-old veterinarian was
raped and murdered near the southern city of Hyderabad. Police
shot dead four men who had been arrested for the attack,
claiming that they had tried to escape.
"THESE ARE POWERFUL PEOPLE"
Often victims and their families go up against powerful
people and harsh caste dynamics, especially in rural India,
where two thirds of the country live.
In Hindu Nagar, caste lines are visible from the street.
Homes built of cement belong to the upper castes. Mud-and-thatch
huts are inhabited by the lower castes. After the attack, dozens
of police officers were employed to maintain order as crowds of
journalists and politicians descended on the village.
The two men that the woman had identified as the main
perpetrators in her rape - Shivam Trivedi and Shubham Trivedi -
are both upper caste members of the family of the village
headwoman, Savitri Devi Kundan. Shubham is her son. Shivam is
his cousin. Kundan told Reuters that the five accused, including
her son, had been falsely accused.
Reuters was unable to contact the men, who are being held in
jail in a nearby town. Their family members said they were in
talks to engage a lawyer to fight the murder case. Pradyuman
Shukla, a lawyer who represented Shivam Trivedi in the rape
case, said his client had been "falsely implicated" of rape.
Shukla said he had not been contacted by the family regarding
the murder case.
Dozens of women and young girls from the family of the
accused men marched on a dirt road in the village on Saturday
shouting slogans refuting the allegations against them. They
said the men were innocent and asleep at home that morning of
the alleged murder.
They called for a federal inquiry into the incident, and
accused the woman of trying to lure Shivam Trivedi into a "love
trap" for his money.
"She must have poured petrol over herself to take revenge,
since he didn't want to marry her," said Preeti Bajpai, the
sister of one of the accused, Umesh Bajpai.
Vikrant Vir, the superintendent of police in Unnao district,
where Hindu Nagar is situated, told Reuters on Wednesday that an
investigation into the case was underway.
"The policemen have been suspended for dereliction of duty.
A special investigation team has been formed on my
recommendation, and we are probing the case."
The Uttar Pradesh government spokesperson did not respond to
calls or emails seeking comment.
Most lower-caste women do not study past high school in
Hindu Nagar, and many are married by their teens, villagers
said. The victim was among the few who had graduated. She
applied to become a policewoman but missed the interview last
year as the public bus she took had been late, her father said.
She didn't try again because vacancies in the Uttar Pradesh
police are infrequent, her father said.
While Indian society is changing, its age-old caste system
remains powerful in conservative villages like Hindu Nagar.
Based on identity determined at birth, the hierarchical
social order, prevalent in Hinduism, deems romantic
relationships that cut across caste lines as socially
unacceptable.
The woman's relations with Shivam was seen as unacceptable
by many upper caste people in the village, more than a dozen
villagers Reuters interviewed said.
It was in Dec. 2018 that she first went to the police to
file a complaint saying that Shivam Trivedi and Shubham Trivedi
had misled her into accompanying them to the fields and raping
her at gunpoint on Dec. 12. She got home and told her aunt and
the local police the same day, according to her complaint.
She filed at least three complaints to police between Dec.
2018 and Feb. 2019 accusing the men of rape. Police registered
her case in March, according to copies of the complaints
reviewed by Reuters.
In that March 5 report, the woman alleged Shubham Trivedi
had raped her multiple times in 2018 and made false promises of
marriage. At one point, he took her to the neighbouring city of
Rae Bareilly and briefly locked her up in a room, threatening to
kill her if she tried escaping, the report said.
Over the next few months, she wrote repeatedly to the
police, asking them to speed up the investigation and arrest the
accused. "Despite my complaints, neither have I been medically
checked, nor has my statement been taken, and nor have my
rapists been arrested," she said in an April 1 letter to police.
Police did not respond to comment on the letter.
"Because of police inaction, the family of the accused are
emboldened and are harassing my family and threatening me to
force me to withdraw my case."
In an April 15 letter, she said her life and her family's
was threatened, "These are powerful people with a lot of money,"
she said in an April 15 letter. "Our life is under threat."
She moved to an aunt's home in Rae Bareilly in March,
fearing for her life, according to the police reports. But she
returned weeks before the incident because she missed her
family, her aunt said.
"I had asked her not to go back," she said, referring to the
village.
In a July 12 letter, the woman threatened to kill herself if
police didn't act on her rape complaint.
Shivam was arrested on September 19, but was out on bail on November 30 – days before she was set on fire.
'NOW WHO WILL FIGHT?'
When the shopkeeper Prakash saw the woman on the morning of
her attack, the ends of her short hair were scalded and her
clothes had been burned off her body, he said. Still, she had
walked nearly half a mile from the fields where she was attacked
to his shop in trying to reach the police station, police said.
The Uttar Pradesh government has promised the woman's family
a payment of 2.5 million rupees ($35,000), and a gun license for
the woman's brother to protect the family. It has also suspended
seven policemen from the area for negligence. Calls to the
phones of the suspended policemen went unanswered.
The mud hut where the woman lived had few belongings except
a wooden bed, religious idols on walls, and a small basil plant
that the family worshipped - a common practice in Hindu homes.
Her grieving family said they were living in fear of reprisals
from the accused men.
"She was the only educated and sensible person in the
family," said one of her uncles, breaking down as he spoke.
"None of the men in our family are as brave as she was. She was
fighting all alone," he said, referring to the hierarchy in the
village. "Now who will fight?"