[There have been other recent examples of
sexual assaults being imposed as punishment. In January, when a woman in West
Bengal was found with a married man, an elected village head sent her to a hut
where she was raped repeatedly, perhaps by as many as 15 men, the police said.
And in Pakistan’s Punjab Province the same month, a caste council ordered the
rape of a 45-year-old woman as a penalty after her brother was accused of rape.]
By Ellen
Barry
 |
|
A
13-year-old girl on Saturday revisited the site in Swang Gulgulia Dhoura,
India,
where she was raped as punishment for her brother’s alleged assault.
Credit
Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
|
SWANG
GULGULIA DHOURA, India — For many years, under a tall, spreading neem
tree in the middle of this settlement, the village headman has adjudicated
disputes between his neighbors, doling out tongue-lashings and occasional
penalties.
This, the local police believe, is what
happened here a week ago. It began with an ordinary case of bad behavior: A
young man crept into a hut after dark and groped Suguna Devi, a married woman
and the daughter of the village’s headman, before her shouts woke the village
and he fled.
The next day, villagers waited to see what
punishment the headman would impose on the assailant — until midafternoon, when
they said they saw Ms. Devi’s husband drag the young man’s 13-year-old sister
from her father’s hut and into the woods, where he raped her. The worst thing,
said the girl’s father, was that no one did anything to stop it.
“My wife wept, but nobody listened,” said the
father, Munna Pasi, 62. “My daughter said, ‘Save me, save me,’ but nobody
listened. All these people became blind when he was dragging my daughter away.”
It is the latest in a series of shocking
assaults that have drawn attention to remote villages in India,
where police precincts are far-flung and traditional forms of justice still
dominate. After a surge of news coverage of the episode, police inspectors
converged on the destitute settlement of Swang Gulgulia Dhoura on Saturday.
The authorities have arrested Ghosal Pasi, 45,
the village’s headman, on suspicion of ordering the rape, and his son-in-law,
Nakabandi Pasi, on suspicion of rape. The girl’s brother, Harendra Pasi, is in
custody, on suspicion of assaulting Ms. Devi.
Under the neem tree, the headman’s daughter
lay inert on a rope cot, tears streaking her cheeks, promising that, if only
her father were released, he would not mete out any more punishments. In the
future, she said tonelessly, “if something will happen, people will go to the
police station.”
But others warned that it would be foolish to
expect an end to village justice.
“There is a practice here, to sort out matters
themselves,” said Vinod Vishwakarma, head of an elected village council whose
territory includes the hamlet. “I spoke to some women, they said if something
like this will happen in our village again we will oppose it. But when the girl
tried to seek help from people, they turned away their faces. That’s the fact.”
There have been other recent examples of
sexual assaults being imposed as punishment. In January, when a woman in West
Bengal was found with a married man, an elected village head sent her to a hut
where she was raped repeatedly, perhaps by as many as 15 men, the police said.
And in Pakistan’s Punjab Province the same month, a caste council ordered the
rape of a 45-year-old woman as a penalty after her brother was accused of rape.
The residents of Swang Gulgulia Dhoura,
members of an untouchable caste who traditionally earned money by begging, are
strikingly isolated from mainstream society. When he began pushing for the
village’s children to attend school, Anant Das, an aid worker, was shocked that
the residents “were not aware of national holidays” and that many could not
identify Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Only in the last few
years, he said, have a few televisions appeared in the village.
“Nobody knows these people,” he said. “They
have no education. They are not being treated as human beings.”
The victim, a watchful, reed-thin girl with a
long ponytail, clasped and unclasped her fingers on Saturday as the adults
discussed what had happened to her. On Sunday night, said Munna Pasi, her
father, the girl’s brother Harendra had consumed “a kind of rice beer” and
crept, partly disrobed, into Suguna Devi’s house, where he “tried to molest
her.”
First thing in the morning, Mr. Pasi said, he
approached the headman, seeking some settlement. “I said, ‘My son did wrong,
and we are willing to take the punishment,’ ” he said. “I realized we
needed to pay some fine. I said, if you want to impose a punishment, then beat
him.” But when the headman gave no answer, Mr. Pasi said, he went to work
scavenging coal.
While he was gone, the police say, the headman
delivered his verdict.
“Ghosal told his son-in-law, ‘You do the same
thing to his daughter that this man did to your wife,’ so he grabbed her and
dragged her to the jungle,” said Lakshman Prasad Singh, inspector general of
the Jharkhand State police. The girl’s mother, Sonamani Devi, 42, said that her
daughter was folding clothes inside their hut when the headman’s daughter burst
in and “caught hold of my daughter by grabbing her hand and hair” and then
passed her to her husband, Nakabandi Pasi.
Sunita Devi, a neighbor, said she and other
women heard the girl screaming but did nothing because, she explained, “We did
not know he was going to rape her.” The girl limped back to her family’s hut 45
minutes later, and then set out on the hourlong walk to the nearest police
station.
In interviews, the headman’s relatives denied
that he ordered the assault or looked on as the girl was dragged away. Gupta
Kumar, 18, his son, said that there was a plan to convene a council to decide
on a punishment, but that Harendra did not show up, and that after that the
headman slept for much of the day because he had taken a medication.
“My father did not order anything,” he said.
“Out of anger my brother-in-law did this thing.”
Pressure seemed to be building in the village
on Saturday. The district administration had stationed two armed guards outside
the victim’s hut, and politicians had been stopping by with small cash gifts
and sacks of food for the family. Mr. Pasi, his face grave and deeply lined,
said that the headman’s relatives had come to him repeatedly, asking him to
withdraw the charges, but that he had refused.
“When this was done to my family and my
daughter, nobody came forward to help us,” he said. “Why should I be lenient to
anybody?”
Hari Kumar contributed
reporting.
