[But the Mumbai case
provides an unusual glimpse into a group of bored young men who had committed
the same crime often enough to develop a routine. The police say the men had
committed at least five rapes in the same spot. Their casual confidence
reinforces the notion that rape has been a largely invisible crime here, where
convictions are infrequent and victims silently go away. Not until their
arrest, at a moment when sexual violence has grabbed headlines and risen to the
top of the state’s agenda, did the seriousness of the crime sink in.]
By Ellen Barry And Mansi Choksi
 |
Atul Loke for
The New York Times
The slum in Mumbai, India, where one of the five
suspects in the gang
rape of a photojournalist was arrested.
|
MUMBAI, India — At 5:30 p.m. on that Thursday, four young men were playing cards,
as usual, when Mohammed Kasim Sheikh’s cellphone rang and he announced that it
was time to go hunting. Prey had been spotted, he told a friend. When the host
asked what they were going to hunt, he said, “A beautiful deer.”
As two men rushed out,
the host smirked, figuring they did not like losing at cards.
Two hours later, a
22-year-old photojournalist limped out of a ruined building. She had been raped
repeatedly by five men, asked by one to re-enact pornographic acts displayed on
a cellphone. After she left, the men dispersed to their wives or mothers, if
they had them; it was dinnertime. None of their previous victims had gone to
the police. Why should this one?
The trial in the Mumbai
gang-rape case has opened to a drowsy and ill-attended courtroom, without the
crush of reporters who documented every twist in a similar case in New Delhi in which a woman
died after being gang-raped on a private bus. The accused, barefoot, sit on a
bench at the back of the courtroom, observing the arguments with blank
expressions, as if they were being conducted in Mandarin. All have pleaded not
guilty. They are slight men with ordinary faces, nothing imposing, the kind one
might see at any bus stop or tea stall.
But the Mumbai case
provides an unusual glimpse into a group of bored young men who had committed
the same crime often enough to develop a routine. The police say the men had
committed at least five rapes in the same spot. Their casual confidence
reinforces the notion that rape has been a largely invisible crime here, where
convictions are infrequent and victims silently go away. Not until their
arrest, at a moment when sexual violence has grabbed headlines and risen to the
top of the state’s agenda, did the seriousness of the crime sink in.
An editor at the
photographer’s publication, who was present when a witness identified the first
of the five suspects, a juvenile, said the teenager dissolved in tears as soon
as he was accused.
“It was exactly like
watching a kid in school who has been caught doing something,” said the editor,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the identity of the victim,
who cannot be identified according to Indian law. “It’s like a bunch of kids
who found a dog and tied a bunch of firecrackers to its tail, just to see what
would happen. Only in this case it was far more egregious. It was malevolent,
what happened.”
In spots Mumbai is an
anarchic jumble, its high-rise buildings flanked by vest-pocket slums and
vacant properties that have reverted to near-wilderness. One such place is the
Shakti Mills, a ruin from the prosperous days of Mumbai’s textile industry.
When night falls, it is a treacherous span of darkness lined with sinkholes and
debris, but still in the middle of the city, still close enough to look up and
watch the lights flicker on in the Shangri-La Hotel.
The photographer and her
colleague, a 21-year-old man, were interns at an English-language publication
and had decided to include this spot — the backdrop for any number of fashion
shoots — as part of a photo essay on the city’s abandoned buildings, the editor
said. On that Thursday last August, they reached the ruined mill about an hour
before sunset.
The five men they
encountered there later came from slums near the mill complex, claustrophobic
concrete warrens where electrical wires tangle at one’s head and acrid water
flows in open gutters around one’s feet.
None of the men worked
regularly. There were jobs chicken-plucking at a neighborhood stand — a hot,
stinking eight-hour shift that paid 250 rupees, or $4. The men told their
families they wanted something better, something indoors, but that thing never
seemed to come. They passed time playing cards and drinking. Luxury was pressed
in their faces in the sinuous form of the Lodha Bellissimo, a
48-story apartment building rising from an adjacent lot.
“Every boy in this
neighborhood, including myself, would look at those buildings and say, ‘One
day, I will own a flat in that building,’ ” said Yasin Sheikh, 22, who
knew two of the accused men from the neighborhood. Because of his work helping
find slum locations for film crews, he sometimes has a chance to interact with
wealthy people, he said, and it fills him with yearning.
“I feel really sad
around them, because I want to sit at the table with them,” he said.
Only Kasim Sheikh, 20,
the card player who took the call, seemed to have shaken off the drag of
poverty. A plump man in a neighborhood of the half-starved, he wore flashy
shirts and hooked up his friends with catering jobs at weddings. He had been
convicted of theft — iron, steel and other scrap from a railroad site — and
occasionally provided information to the police, according to Mumbai’s joint
police commissioner, Himanshu Roy.
Some people steered
clear of Mr. Sheikh. The grandmother of one of the accused men, a 16-year-old
whose name is being withheld because of his age, had forbidden Mr. Sheikh to
cross their threshold. But her grandson craved nice things; that was his
weakness, his grandmother said. Mr. Sheikh “wore good clothes, he had a nice
mobile, obviously he would, because he was a thief,” said Yasin Sheikh, the
neighbor.
When another of their
friends, a 27-year-old father of two named Salim Ansari, spotted the interns in
the mill that day, the first thing he did was call Kasim Sheikh to tell him
that their prey had arrived.
Nothing to Lose
During the year since
the Delhi gang rape, sexual violence has been discussed endlessly in India, but
there are few clear answers to the questions of how much is it happening or
why.
One problem is that
perpetrators may not view their actions as a grave crime, but something closer
to mischief. A survey of
more than 10,000 men carried out in six Asian countries — India not among them
— and published in The Lancet Global Health journal in September came up with
startling data. It found that, when the word “rape” was not used as part of a
questionnaire, more than one in 10 men in the region admitted to forcing sex on
a woman who was not their partner.
Asked why, 73 percent
said the reason was “entitlement.” Fifty-nine percent said their motivation was
“entertainment seeking,” agreeing with the statements “I wanted to have fun” or
“I was bored.” Flavia Agnes, a Mumbai women’s rights lawyer who has been
working on rape cases since the 1970s, said the findings rang true to her
experience.
“It’s just frivolous;
they just do it casually,” she said. “There is so much abject poverty. They
just want to have a little fun on the side. That’s it. See, they have nothing
to lose.”
The photographer and her
colleague reached the mill but, visually, it was not what they wanted. That is
when two men approached them, the victim told the police later, offering to
show them a route farther in. There the images were better, and the two had
been working for half an hour when the two men returned.
‘The Prey Is Here’
This time they came back
with a third, Mr. Sheikh, who told them something odd — “Our boss has seen you,
and you have to come with us now” — and insisted they take a path deeper into
the complex. As they walked, she called an editor, who said to leave
immediately, but it was too late for that. “Come inside, the prey is here,” Mr.
Sheikh called out, and two more men joined them.
The men said that the
woman’s colleague was a murder suspect, asked the pair to remove their belts
and used them to tie the man up. After that, the woman told the police, “the
third person and a person who had a mustache took me to a place that was like a
broken room.”
The men had done the
same thing a month before, said Mr. Roy, the police commissioner, taking turns
raping an 18-year-old call-center worker who, accompanied by her boyfriend, had
sprained her ankle and was trying to take a shortcut through the mill. They had
done the same thing with a woman who worked as a scavenger in a garbage dump,
and a sex worker, and a transvestite, Mr. Roy said.
Mr. Sheikh took the
broken neck of a beer bottle out of his shirt pocket and thrust it at the young
woman, telling her: “You don’t know what a bastard I am. You’re not the first
girl I’ve raped,” she told the police later, according to the charge sheet
filed in the case.
On the other side of the
wall, her friend heard the woman cry out. “An inquiry is going on,” the man
guarding him said. They went in to her and returned, one by one.
“Did you inquire
properly?” Mr. Sheikh said to one as he came out.
“No, she’s not talking,”
he replied.
So Mr. Sheikh said he
would “go inquire again,” and the rest of them laughed.
At last they brought her
out, weeping, and told the two to leave along the railroad tracks. Before
releasing her, they threatened to upload video of the attack onto the Internet
if she reported the crime, a strategy that had worked with previous victims.
But this one did not
hesitate. The two caught a cab to the nearest hospital. There they reported the
crime, and the woman’s mother arrived. “I went inside. I saw her there crying,”
her mother told the police later. “She told me in English, ‘Mummy, I’m vanished.’ ”
The woman did not
respond to a request for an interview.
Mr. Sheikh, too, saw his
mother for a few moments that night. He discussed the rape with her, she said,
and tried to explain why it had happened.
“I asked Kasim, ‘Son,
why did you do this to her? If it happened to your sister, would you come here
and tell me or would you beat him?’ ” said his mother, Chandbibi Sheikh.
He told her that his friends had come upon the couple embracing in the mill,
and “they thought: ‘What is she doing with this boy here? She must be
loose.’ ”
She related this
exchange from the family’s home, a sort of shelf wedged between a gas station
and a garbage dump; as she spoke, a rat the size of a kitten clambered over
containers stacked in a corner. She said far too much onus was being put on the
men.
“Obviously, the fault is
the girl’s,” she said. “Why did she have to go to that jungle? It’s her fault,
too. Also, she was wearing skimpy clothes.”
She did not deny that he
had done it. “He must have,” she said. “He told me that they tied up the boy
who was doing bad things to her and said, ‘Madam, let us also do it.’ The madam
said, ‘Don’t do it to me, take my mobile, take my camera, but don’t do it to
me.’ Her body was uncovered. How could he control himself? And so it happened.”
High-Level Response
Though the men in the
mill may not have known it, rape had become a matter of great public import in
India, a gauge of a city’s identity. Mumbai’s top officials, who had told
themselves that the Delhi gang rape could not have happened here, were
horrified and initiated a broad, high-level response, as if an act of terrorism
had taken place.
The police lighted up
their networks of slum informants and all five were arrested and gave
confessions in quick succession. Several made pitiful attempts to escape. Mr.
Sheikh went to the visitor’s room of a nearby hospital and covered himself
with a blanket, trying to blend in with a crowd of relatives. He was caught
with 50 rupees, or about 81 cents, in his pocket. When the police asked him to sign
his confession, he told them he could not write, so he signed it with a
thumbprint.
“It is incredible how
quickly the whole thing unraveled,” said the editor, who was present when the
photographer’s colleague picked the first of the five men out of a lineup. A
second victim, the call-center worker, came forward, inspired by the first, and
said she was ready to testify. The suspects confessed to the other rapes under
questioning, the police said.
The public prosecutor
selected for the case is famous for prosecuting terrorists, with a résumé of
628 life sentences, 30 death sentences and 12 men, as he put it, “sent to the
gallows.”
Much news coverage over
the next days zeroed in on the defendants’ poverty, but Mr. Roy shrugged off
that line of inquiry. After interrogating the five accused men personally, he
said they were “social outcasts,” not indicative of any deeper tensions in the
city.
“They were deviants,
sociopaths, predators,” he said in an interview. “If there was a larger
socioeconomic framework, these crimes would be happening again and again. It
was only these guys. I’m 100 percent sure that this kind of crime doesn’t
happen in Mumbai. I’ve been here all my life and have been born and brought up
here.”
But in a constellation
of neighborhoods around Mumbai, people are still trying to match up the crime
with the ordinary men they knew.
Shahjahan Ansari, the
wife of the oldest accused man, Salim Ansari, looked terrified when a stranger
appeared at her door, at a hulking, trash-strewn public housing complex beside
a petroleum refinery on a distant edge of the city. The neighbors had started
to shun the family since Salim’s arrest became public, and she dreaded the
extra attention.
“We can’t even walk on
the street. You don’t understand,” she said. Inside the apartment, she calmed
down a little. The whole story baffled her; she said she had no idea who her
husband’s friends were or what he did during the day when she went to work
cleaning houses. All she knew was that until his arrest, he came home for dinner
every night, “He was to me like any husband is to his wife,” she said.
“How do I know how he
got into this mess? It must be the Devil,” murmured Salim’s mother, who was
sitting on the floor, one eye blind, cloudy white.
Ms. Ansari was
remembering better days before her husband lost his job, at a factory that made
cardboard boxes. He was so proud of the factory, with its big machines, that he
brought his sons to watch him on Sunday shifts. Tonight the younger one was
streaked with dust; the older one watched from a cot, glassy-eyed and much
smaller than his 10 years, bony limbs folded under his chin. She would try, Ms.
Ansari said, to move them somewhere else, to a place where no one knew who
their father was.
“I want my children to
grow up to be good human beings, that’s all,” the mother said.
Neha Thirani Bagri contributed reporting.
