Thread by @bijaya_biswal

Why are rapes of dalit/adivasi women never declared as the "rarest of rare" cases?

1/23

When the "Nirbhaya" rape took place in Dec 2012, former Chief Justice Leila Seth was bewildered by the gruesome nature of the crime. The doctor involved in examining the victim admitted she had never seen anything so ruthless in her entire career.

2/23

The case was considered “rarest of the rare” in the court of law since it had shocked the collective conscience of the people owing to “the manner of commission of the murder, the motive for commission of the murder...

...anti-social or socially abhorrent nature of the crime, magnitude of the crime and personality of the victim of murder.” Death penalty was sanctioned for the convicted, believing this would deter similar crimes and deliver justice to Jyoti Singh’s family.

2 years later, a mentally challenged woman’s naked body was found in a field near the highway in Haryana’s Rohtak, half eaten by animals, with key organs missing. The police said sticks, stones and condoms were stuffed into her private parts.

5/23

”I have never seen such a horrific case in 30 years,” reiterated SK Dattarwal, who headed the post mortem examination. “Rarest of the rare” cases was starting to lose meaning, becoming more and more frequent. But worse things had happened in the country, which no one knew about.

On 29 Sep 2006, four members of a Dalit family were murdered in Khairlanji, a village in Bhandara district of Maharashtra, close to Nagpur. Surekha Bhotmange and her seventeen years old daughter Priyanka were stripped,battered, paraded naked, raped several times.

And killed by a mob led by Hindu men of the Kunabi-Maratha caste in the presence of the entire village.Roshan and Sudhir, Surekha’s sons, were also beaten, tortured and murdered for trying to save their mother and sister. Only Surekha’s husband, Bhaiyalal Bhotmange survived.
8/23

He watched the lynching and rape hiding behind a bush. “I saw the attack from a distance”, he said in an interview. “I saw my wife, daughter and two sons being beaten while being abused: ‘You mahars, dheds, you have chadhle [things have gone to your head]’!

They were stripped naked and carried to the village square. When the dead body was found, he identified it and said, “There was not a single piece of cloth on the body. Her skull was broken and brain had spilled outShe had even lost one eye.”

It had started over a land dispute which was concluded in the favour of the Bhotmange family and this wasn’t just an act of revenge, but also a blatant display of hegemony. An act of terrorism. A typical case of dalits being shown their place by the majority population.

11/23

The mainstream media did not cover this incident for two months, even though October saw two major congregations of Dalits in Nagpur, commemorating Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism and another mass conversion which he had led.

The judges ruled that SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 was not applicable to the Khairlanji case because, according to them, there was no caste angle to the crime, but only “vengeance”.

The High Court commuted the death sentence of six of the accused on the grounds that it was “not the rarest of the rare cases” warranting the death penalty. The appeal court later modified the sentence to a 25-year imprisonment. Mr Bhotmange was dead by the time the trial ended.

Previously, in a press conference he was asked about the number of people who were involved in the incident. “The entire village was involved, sir. Entire village. I just named 60 to 70 people, but the entire village participated in this incident.”

15/23

The act of stripping the women of this Dalit family, parading them in broad daylight, raping them brutally is not equal to a rape in secrecy. A crime as a public spectacle is intended upon reminding the victimized community about their powerlessness and inferiority.

The caste angle was the entire point of the act, since it was facilitated and encouraged by the complicity of the entire village. But they were right, this isn’t the rarest of the rare cases. This is tradition.

A year before the Nirbhaya rape case, the nose and limbs of a 17 year old Dalit girl were cut by the rapists for resisting rape. In 2016, a 30 year old Dalit woman had her intestines pulled out after a gangrape in Kerala.

18/23

In 2017, a skull of a girl in Rohtak was crushed and objects were found in her private parts after rape. In October the same year,a 12 year old Dalit girl was found with her genitals and face mutilated after rape. March 2019, a 12 year old girl in MP was gangraped beheaded.

Same year, a 14 year old Dalit child was raped and her eyes were gouged out. Early 2020 in North Gujarat, a 19 year old was kidnapped, sodomized and murdered, hung from a tree. Her genitals were torn apart and her rectum had prolapsed.

If we look at the average number of rapes in 2012, Nirbhaya was just one of the 68 victims that day. But she was different because she was relatable.

21/23

Portrayed in the media as a woman living in urban India, neither a Dalit nor adivasi, raped by a bunch of poor migrants instead of the army, the paramilitary or upper class powerful men. Similar pattern emerged in the rape of a young veterinary doctor in Hyderabad(2019)

22/23

Conviction rate for rapes of Dalit women is under 2%, compared to the national conviction rate of 25%. Being a woman sucks in India. But being a woman from the oppressed caste, means having the evidence of your pain reduced to ashes before even being seen.

23/23