The Nitish Kumar government may insist that law and order
problems are a thing of the past in Bihar but its curious reluctance to deliver
justice to a teenage gang-rape victim undermines the claim, writes Manoj Chaurasia ...
Bihar under chief minister Mr
Nitish Kumar is repeatedly projected as a land where crime is history. The
administrators claim that the jails of the state are choc-a-bloc with notorious
criminals whose trials have been fast tracked, that no massacre has taken place
in the state since 2005 and that people are leading a much more harmonious
life. Bihar’s ‘transformation’ has not only captivated national dailies but
also international publications such as The Economist, The New York Times and
Time that believe the state has become a model of governance worth emulating
across the country.
However, while the Assam
government lost no time in putting the alleged perpetrators behind bars
following the very public molestation of a young girl on a Guwahati street
after TV channels ran the news, Bihar continues to investigate and
re-investigate the gang-rape of a teenage girl nearly two months after the
crime was committed in the high-security zone of Patna. While the crime is
believed to have been committed last June, the principal culprits ~ who
reportedly come from influential families ~ remain untraceable. The Opposition
is accusing the powers-that-be of pressuring the administration to shield the
perpetrators.
Apparently, police initially took
no notice despite a copy of the CD containing footage of the gang-rape being
made available to them on 12 July, 2012. It is believed that the perpetrators ~
some eight of them ~ had uploaded the footage onto the Internet once the victim
refused to submit to them any more.
The victim was apparently duped by
her boyfriend Prashant Jha into entering Flat No 301 of Rambha Apartment
located off Patna’s upscale Bailey Road where seven other young men were
waiting for them. While each of them took turns to rape the teenager, one managed
to capture the gang-rape on his cellphone. CDs were eventually burnt to
blackmail the teenager into repeated submission. This went on for a month. When
the victim started resisting them, the perpetrators started circulating the CDs
and also ensured that the footage found its way into the Internet. Even Patna
police received a copy but took no action saying the victim needed to lodge a
complaint first.
“If news channels had been
reporting a gang-rape for one week, why did not police at least get in touch with
reporters?” wondered noted social activist Ms Kanchan Bala. It was only after
local TV news channels kept following up the news, telecast bits of the footage
and flashed pictures of the perpetrators on 12 July, 2012 that the
administration found itself under pressure. Women’s rights groups took to the
streets of the state capital and even organised a candlelight procession. Bihar
women’s commission finally sat up and Commission member Chandramukhi Devi
visited the victim at her home, recorded her statement and forwarded her
complaint to police. It was then that police registered a first information
report (FIR).
But the Opposition alleges that
the FIR had been deliberately diluted to protect the perpetrators. In an open
letter dated 6 August, 2012 to the state’s director-general of police,
Opposition lawmakers raised 17 points. “Even after the women’s commission had
obtained a signed statement from the victim on 18 July, why did not police
include in the FIR the names of Saurabh and Sushant who figure in her
(victim’s) statement recorded by a court under Section 164 of the CrPC?” is one
point raised by the Opposition. The open letter also suggests that police
arrested only six perpetrators while the victim had mentioned eight in her
statement to the court.
Police swung into action when
Patna’s chief judicial magistrate issued a warrant of arrest against the
culprits after taking suo motu cognisance of the gang-rape that was reported by
a newspaper on its front page on 25 July, 2012. But, Saurabh, said to be the
son of a JD-S lawmaker in the Nitish Kumar government, is still evading arrest.
The conspiracy to protect Saurabh became apparent when police picked up Dinesh
Paswan, a domestic help with the alleged perpetrator’s family, and produced him
in the court of the CJM, Patna asserting that he was the missing Saurabh.
According to the Opposition’s open letter to the top cop, Paswan spilled the
beans in court and described Saurabh as a “fair complexioned, handsome boy who
resides in a government flat near the Hanuman Mandir in Ranvanshi Nagar”. A
JD-U lawmaker has already lodged a complaint against a local Hindi news portal
for suggesting that Saurabh was his son.
Bihar’s women’s commission too has
accused police of shielding the main culprits. “The scene of crime described by
the culprit does not match what police insist is,” Chandramukhi Devi said, it
alleging that Patna police were trying to cover up for powerful people. She
said: “Police are definitely under huge pressure to make the victim recant. The
scene of crime that police are scouring bears little resemblance to what is on
the rape footage.”
Local media claims that it had
received the CD about a month ago and promptly handed a copy to the then Patna
city superintendent of police Ms Kim Sharma for action. It is believed that Ms
Sharma had been secretly gathering evidence when she was transferred to the
distant eastern Bihar town of Katihar. The administration remains tight-lipped.
The matter rocked the current monsoon session of the state Assembly but the
only thing the government has done so far is to make a routine promise to
deliver justice to the victim.
The teenage victim, who is from a
family of modest means, has described the gang-rape as a nightmare. With both
the chief minister and the director-general of police remaining mysteriously
mum, it seems her ordeal is far from over.
The writer is The Statesman’s Patna-based Special Representative
No comments:
Post a Comment