New Delhi: “I never lost hope,” the Muzaffarnagar gangrape survivor told the media Thursday, after winning a 10-year legal battle against the accused earlier in the week. Her path to justice was, however, long-winded and beset with multiple hurdles, she added.
The survivor, now 36, was raped by three men on 8 September 2013, during the Jat-Muslim communal violence that swept through western Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district, leaving at least 60 people dead, around 100 injured and many families displaced.
A trial court in UP Tuesday sentenced two of the men to 20 years imprisonment. It also imposed a fine of Rs 15,000 on them. The case against the third accused was abated in 2020 after he passed away during the trial.
Speaking at a press conference held at the office of Anhad, an NGO based in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar Thursday, senior advocate Vrinda Grover who acted as the survivor’s lawyer, said the the only thing to be “celebrated” is the survivor’s resolve.
Grover, her legal team and the survivor spoke about the extremely “hostile” environment during the case hearings — from “delay tactics” to “inappropriate” questioning by the other side.
They alleged that during cross-examination, the accused’s counsel focused their line of questioning on the survivor’s sexual past, insinuated sexual promiscuity, and insinuated that her marriage with her husband was illegitimate, despite the couple being married for seven years before the incident of rape.
The survivor’s legal team claimed to quoting verbatim a question posed to the woman’s husband — “Is it right to say that the victim is your rakhel (mistress)?”
They also said that it was owing to the defence counsel’s “delay tactics” during the final arguments that the case was prolonged, explaining that this meant the counsel would delay the hearing until the judge would get transferred.
When a judge is transferred during final arguments in a case, the new judge has to hear arguments from both sides all over again.
Grover alleged that this “manufactured delay” was well-planned since the accused knew the complainant along with the lawyers had to travel to court for every hearing and “wearing them out” would work.
The survivor had approached the Supreme Court in February this year, and petitioned for day-to-day hearing of her case, citing “inordinate and excessive delay” in the case. On 13 March, the apex court asserted that the scenario “troubles us” and asked the trial court to take up the matter on priority.
The judgment in the case was finally reserved on 26 April, and the sentence was announced Tuesday.
The conviction is the first such judgment that has been passed under Section 376 (2) (G) (gangrape during communal violence) of the Indian Penal Code, according to the survivor’s lawyers.
‘Judgment fell short’
Talking about the survivor’s “10-year stamina”, Grover said it was a comment on the system, for the system “knows” that “people cannot endure 10 years of this process”.
According to the judgment in the case, accessed by ThePrint, on the date of the assault, the survivor was fleeing her village, Lank (in Shamli, Muzaffarnagar) with her family, after they heard of riots breaking out. While running, the survivor, who was carrying her then three-month-old child in her arms, got separated from the rest of her family.
She went to a nearby sugarcane fields to hide. However, the child’s crying, alerted the three men — identified in the judgment as Kuldeep, Maheshveer and Sikandar — to her presence there.
The judgment added that Kuldeep was armed with a gun and Sikandar had a knife with him. While Kuldeep snatched her son away, Sikandar held a knife to the child’s throat.
The three men then raped her, with each of them taking turns to hold the knife to her son’s throat.
Over the years, the woman and her lawyers said, she had to suffer multiple death threats from the accused and people belonging to her village, and was even offered money multiple times from the now-convicted rapists, which she refused.
Her legal team had to appeal to the National Commission for Minorities for security, fearing for safety on the way to the court, as well as within the court premises. They alleged that people known to the accused would appear in court and hurl threats at them, the survivors and her lawyers said.
“The hostility has only increased over the past 10 years and has become so high that it is not safe for lawyers to appear on this side anymore,” Grover told the media.
One place where the judgment “fell short”, according to legal team, was that it did not look into compensation for the survivor and her safety throughout the process.
The survivor, along with six other women who had alleged rape during the riots, had earlier received a compensation of Rs 5 lakh from the UP government in 2014. The survivor and her husband bought a home in a village in Shamli with this money.
While the couple currently live in Shamli, two years after receiving the compensation, she had had to move her family from there to Delhi, because of how unsafe she felt there, the survivor had earlier told ThePrint.
The judgment did not account for her family’s displacement and dislocation, according to her lawyers.
When asked if she was confident that she would get justice, the survivor nodded without hesitation. “I never had the feeling to give up. I knew when I reached Delhi and met Shabnam Hashmi (founder and managing trustee of Anhad), and when I received support from these lawyers and from my family, that as a mother, I’ll do anything to keep my children safe,” she said, with tears in her eyes.
The survivor had earlier told ThePrint that she “continued the fight so that looking at me, other women may also find the strength to fight such battles…I don’t want anybody else to go through what I did”.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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