October 1, 2020
I wish I was someone else today. Someone who could express what I feel in words. Like Pablo Neruda has done with --
‘Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
I can feel his loss, his grief, his pain. I want you to feel mine. I want you to feel the pain of the girl, the brother, the mother, those down-trodden and caste-away. I wish I could make you feel it.
Yesterday send shock waves through me.
Yesterday a low-caste girl who had been gang-raped by four upper-caste men two weeks ago was cremated, at night, by policemen of Uttar Pradesh without the consent, or presence, of her family. I watched her mother cry and beat her hands on the ground pleading for them to let the family keep the body and cremate it in the day as Hindu custom dictates. I watched her brother speak in a broken voice, ‘I don’t know if it was my sister. I don’t even know if there was a body.’ I watched a horde of policemen stand and prevent people from coming close to the cremation area. I watched them lie and say that the family had agreed, that someone from the family was present. I watched it again and again. I needed to feel it deeply. I cried. I am crying as I remember and write this.
The dark night... a pyre... policemen forming a cordon, yelling at the villagers who get close... the crying mother... an officer coldly refusing to answer a pleading voice asking why and on whose orders they were doing this... the brother who didn’t see his sister before her body was burnt... the district magistrate saying he had permission from the family... an official saying that the post-mortem showed no evidence of rape, or broken bones... the mother saying she was naked and there was blood on her vagina and her back was broken... another family member saying they were receiving death threats, we will go to jail but shoot one or two of you before we go...
The girl had been cutting grass in the fields when the four men, whom she later identified while on a hospital bed, grabbed and raped her, they broke her back and strangled her. Her tongue was found cut—from being caught in her teeth when they strangled her—and bleeding too. She lay in the general ward of a hospital while the family begged for treatment. She was later transferred to another hospital, but she died.
Do you remember the film A TIME TO KILL? A 10-year-old African American girl was raped by two white men, strung up, used as target practice and then tossed into a ravine. Do you remember what it took to get justice? What threats were made, and violence perpetrated against the lawyers fighting the case? Do you remember what you felt?
Same dynamic. Low-caste and female in Uttar Pradesh India, where 60,000 women are raped annually and horrible things are done to dalits.
I know this, i do. Yet the scenes of the cover-up, the hasty cremation shattered me. Yes, the night was shattered, and lightning tore apart the sky.
But that was not all that happened. In a 28-year-old case where a mosque had been destroyed after a prolonged campaign of hate, all the accused were acquitted. I had watched it on BBC in 1992. It was a pivotal moment in my life, in the life of my country. Before and after not the same. My head aches and I am too numb to express the shatter, the rage, the explosive waves of pain when I read the news of this verdict and saw the jubilation of the perpetrators, and the joy with which one of them spoke of taking on other mosques now.
There was ample evidence, gathered by CBI, other recordings, a commission of inquiry – all insufficient to show the conspiracy. The ‘blatantest’ of blatant lies. But a country, 1.3 billion Indians, accepts and is happy—at least that’s what one of the accused said, ‘all of India is happy.’ Silent collusion. Brainwashed, blind, allowing injustice, feeling no shame.
September 30, the worst day in 2020. So far.
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