A tale of two daughters

One girl is a Dalit from Hathras in UP. I am having difficulty tracing her name from the newspapers! Not many seem to have even asked! ‘Dalit girl’ is how she is being described.

The other girl in the news is Rhea Chakraborty. Because she aspired to be an actor, she was based in Mumbai, close to Bollywood, the object of her dreams.

The first girl was born and grew up in rural India. She was the first member of her family to be sent to school till class V, so we can assume that she was at least semi-literate as most teenaged village girls in UP now thankfully are. She does not seem to have been married or betrothed. If she was, the newshounds would have mentioned the fact in their despatches. However, she appears to have been chased by four upper-caste Thakur boys from the village. From ancient times, upper-caste males have assumed a proprietorial interest in the bodies of poor Dalit women residing on their land or nearby.

The second girl was more fortunate, having been born in a middle-class family, the daughter of an Army surgeon. She fell in love, or so she thought, with an up-and-coming actor, Sushant Singh Rajput, with whom she shared a close relationship. It is learnt that Sushant suffered from a bipolar disorder and used to consume narcotic substances even before he met Rhea.

This story is about these two girls, one living, one dead, and how their cases were handled differently by the guardians of the law, of whom I was not long ago, a proud member! In the case of the poor Dalit girl, the UP police went overboard in trying to exculpate the four alleged culprits belonging incidentally to the Thakur community, much revered in the annals of military exploits in our country. The girl’s family now alleges she was raped by the boys but that charge has been strenuously denied by the four as well as by the police. However, nobody can deny that the girl met a grisly end by beatings and strangulation.

In the other case, police units controlled by the Union Home Ministry made Herculean efforts to inculpate Sushant’s lover for some crime or other, to be dug out over three months. Finally, it was the Narcotics Control Bureau that hit ‘pay dirt’ when it found that Sushant was on drugs and his lover was helping him to access them! Never mind that the quantities found were minuscule, the smallest find the NCB had ever made! The mandate was to get Rhea at any cost and, voila, they emerged triumphant! Foreign-based supply chains working the Indian market was the reason for the establishment of the Bureau. The NCB operatives landed up in Bollywood instead!

So, there you have two principles operating on two different planes — one, Extricate (the Rajput boys) at all costs, and two, Implicate (Rhea) at all costs! What we were taught during police training and what our conscience told us was that the truth has to be established. No culprit should be allowed to escape the tentacles of the justice system. But the same justice system would suffer immeasurable harm and shame as well if innocent persons were unjustly implicated.

Arranging for the CBI and sending the ED and finally the NCB to nail Rhea for a Rajput’s life which the bipolar patient had himself taken, and happily consigning the Dalit girl’s rape and murder investigation to a pliant State constabulary which had already decided that ‘No rape had occurred’, speaks volumes about the politicisation which has reduced the upholders of the law to puppets in the hands of partisan politicians.

The indignity of the midnight cremation without permitting the parents and family to participate in the rituals was a total negation of individual rights and also of Hindu culture! Perhaps, the UP government had changed the meaning of Hindu culture to include only upper castes in the Hindu fold! Since my own ancestors renounced Hinduism at the urging of Portuguese conquerors some four or five centuries ago, I admit that I am not competent or qualified to comment on the State’s decision to exclude the nearest relatives of the Dalit girl from her last rites.

Not many in the country will believe that the Dalit girl was not raped. Since the girl was medically examined days after she was attacked, semen could not have been traced in any case. Crying ‘No rape’ because of your own initial defaults of not getting a medical examination conducted immediately is a grave act of omission in ordinary cases. Worse, it is an act of commission if the police were influenced by caste considerations! The reactions of subordinate police functionaries are not difficult to decipher. As the CM of Uttar Pradesh never fails to make his intentions and wishes known, police station-level staff will always want to pre-judge the Big Man’s reactions and fashion their own investigations of such cases in a manner that they think will please the Big Man. The partiality of the police to allow upper-caste men to gather in spite of Section 144 orders to demand justice for the four arrested youths while denying meetings between the Dalit family and Opposition parties’ representatives is itself eloquent!

In the Sushant matter, Rhea has already gone through a gamut of torment for her ill-fated romance. I had written in an earlier despatch that if the CBI were trying to turn an obvious suicide into murder, it would have a whole lot of obfuscation to attempt that would invite loss of prestige and damage its reputation. I am impressed with the forensic medical team of the AIIMS which stuck to the truth of its findings, unlike some of our police officers who choose advancement in careers or post-retirement sinecures over dharma.

In his classic novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy had ‘The President of the Immortals ending his play with Tess’. India’s daughters, the Dalit girl from Hathras and Rhea, have faced enormous injustice in our own times. In one girl’s case, the President of the Immortals ended his play with her cruel death. Let us hope and pray that Rhea will cease to be a plaything in the hands of the powerful and that some semblance of justice will prevail now that it has been conclusively established that Sushant had taken his own life.