Hyderabad is a fast-modernizing metropolis,
and violence against men accused of rape is finding support.
By
Jeffrey Gettleman
 |
|
People
look at the site in Hyderabad, India where the body of a young woman was
burned
after she was raped and killed. Credit Rebecca Conway
for
The New York Times
|
HYDERABAD,
India — All day, every day,
at a certain point along a highway leading out of Hyderabad, people stop their
cars and get out to peer over the guardrail.
It was here, under a highway bridge, that
four men torched the body of a young veterinarian after they gang-raped and
suffocated her a few weeks ago in a case that horrified the country.
Nearby is another likely crime scene of note:
In the green fields that gently roll away from the highway stands a ring of
yellow police tape where the police gunned down the four accused men. The
police say there was a shootout, and that they killed the men in self-defense.
But that is now under investigation, and most people around here seem to
believe it was a straight-up case of extrajudicial killing.
None of this happened in an isolated part of
India or in some tough, broken place. It happened on the busy outskirts of one
of India’s most up-and-coming cities: Hyderabad.
Apple. Google. Facebook. Uber. All have big
offices in Hyderabad. So does Amazon, which this year opened its largest office
building in the world right here, a futuristic campus with 15,000 employees.
The city, already a huge metropolis of around
10 million, is growing by leaps and bounds. It is famous for its spicy food,
fancy shops, rich residents and good relations between Muslims and Hindus.
Many Muslims in Hyderabad have joined the
protests sweeping the country over a separate issue — a divisive new
citizenship law that many Indians feel discriminates against Muslims in this
Hindu-majority nation.
But the scourge of gang rape is never far
from people’s minds.
Most Hyderabadis seem to believe that the
police officers shot the rape suspects in cold blood and then placed guns in
their hands. Still, many said it was the right thing to do. One crowd even
showered police officers in rose petals.
“It was the need of the hour,” said Akkineni
Nagarjuna, a Hyderabad movie star. “Somebody had to put the fear of God in
them.”
The shootings have uncapped a wave of vigilante
violence against other rape suspects. One was nearly lynched a few days later
on his way to court in Indore.
Many Indians are so fed up with the courts —
and it’s not just that trials can drag on for years, but so often infamous
criminals evade justice — that they crave swift and decisive punishment,
however it comes.
“This is what I like about Hyderabad,” said
Akash Chaturvedi, the sales manager at an exotic car dealership in the city.
“People here are direct. They take action. They hit their targets.’’
“I meet 20 to 25 people a day: politicians,
bureaucrats, big businessmen, celebrities,” he added, as he paused in front of
a blue Lamborghini. “Not a single one is unhappy with the action that has taken
place.”
Cities anywhere contain jarring
contradictions: misery and success, crime and erudition, grit and glitz, all
stacked on top of each other. This is especially true in Hyderabad, a
fast-changing place in southern India that is striving to be included on the
list of the country’s supercities, along with Delhi and Mumbai.
Centuries ago, Hyderabad was the seat of a
vast Muslim kingdom that made a fortune from nearby diamond mines, producing
some of history’s biggest gems, including the colossal 105.6 carat Koh-i-Noor,
which British colonizers snatched.
Today, strong infrastructure and business
friendly policies adopted by Hyderabadi officials have attracted so many
cyber-based companies that an outlying part of the area is now called
Cyberabad. This is where the bloodshed unfolded.
Adding to the suspicions of police foul play
is that V.C. Sajjanar, Cyberabad’s police commissioner, was the supervising
officer in at least two other cases of suspects killed by the police. In each
incident, the officers said they acted in self-defense.
In this case, the police were under heavy
pressure. After the news broke that the veterinarian had been raped and killed,
protests erupted across India. Demonstrators demanded that the suspects be
hanged.
The outcry was not as seismic as what followed
after a young woman was gang raped and fatally brutalized on a moving bus in
New Delhi in 2012, but the incidents presented disturbing parallels. In both,
the young women were on professional tracks, and the weak link was having to
rely on nighttime transport that left them vulnerable.
In the Delhi attack, a woman who was about to
become a physiotherapist came out of a movie theater around 9:30 p.m. She
needed a ride and accepted one from an off-duty bus with few passengers.
In Hyderabad, the 26-year-old veterinarian,
whose name Indian officials have asked not to be disclosed, parked her motor
scooter at a toll plaza outside of a central district around 6 p.m. on Nov. 27.
She grabbed a shared taxi to a mall about 10 miles away, a common practice to
spare drivers a grueling scooter ride.
But she was being watched.
The police said that four men who worked on a
freight truck — Mohammed Arif, Shiva Kumar, Jollu Naveen Kumar and Chintakunta
Chenna Keshavulu — deflated her scooter’s back tire right after she left. Then
they fortified themselves with a couple bottles of cheap Imperial Blue whiskey,
and waited.
India’s rates of sex crimes don’t appear
higher than many other countries, including the United States. But activists
say India has a particular gang rape problem.
Last year, for example, virtually the entire
male staff at an upscale apartment complex in Chennai conspired to rape an
11-year-old disabled girl.
And some of the most widely publicized
criminal cases in India have turned on rape and murder. Sexual violence experts
say this is because many rapists feel that if they destroy the evidence, they
will have a good chance of getting away with the crime.
“The problem in India is the failure of the
criminal justice system,’’ said Sunitha Krishnan, who runs an anti-sexual
trafficking organization in Hyderabad.
According to the police, the veterinarian
came back from the mall at 9:30 p.m. and when the group of men offered to help
her with her flat tire, she sensed danger. On her last phone call, to her
sister, right before going with them, she said she was scared.
The men pulled her into a vacant lot. They
raped her. She bled badly and fainted.
When she came to, Mr. Arif, the ringleader,
according to the police, decided to kill her, smothering her with his hands.
The four dragged her body into their truck and drove off to the stretch of
fields and highway where they set her on fire.
The police were able to use closed-circuit
video footage to identify the truck, which led them to the suspects, and all
four confessed, the police said.
They were in custody on Dec. 6 when the
officers took them out of jail and back to the crime scene, at 3 a.m. The
police said that they needed the men to re-enact the crime, and that two of the
suspects grabbed officers’ guns, provoking a shootout.
Several legal activists in Delhi have filed
lawsuits against the police, saying the shooting amounted to a summary
execution. And the families of two of the suspects said that they were minors.
But you would struggle to find any others in
Hyderabad willing to take the dead men’s side.
“Justice is good,’ said Minhaj Obaid, who
works in a call center for Dell computers, as he stood on the highway bridge.
“And instant justice,’’ he said, smiling, “is
even better.”
Hari Kumari contributed from New Delhi and
S.M. Bilal from Hyderabad
Jeffrey Gettleman is the South Asia bureau
chief, based in New Delhi. He was the winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for
international reporting. @gettleman • Facebook
