COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
ELECTIONS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

The Rediff Special/M D Riti

Tales of women and wanton cruelty

When a neighbour reported that he saw smoke emanating from young Shameem's house late at night, her father Yusuf was terrified. He knew that his daughter was constantly being beaten and kicked by her carpenter husband Sardar, and even once had to terminate her pregnancy because of this. He rushed to the house that he had rented for her, and barged into her bedroom, to find a smoking pile of sarees on her bed. Beneath the pile he found Shameem in a pool of blood, her hands tied behind her and her throat slit horizontally, seven inches one way and five inches the other.....

** "The more you beat her, the more money she will bring you," said Mohan Velu's uncle to him. Velu tried acting on his uncle's advice, and found that it worked almost every time. Kalai Selvi, 20, from Kancheepuram in Tamil Nadu, was garrotted and killed after enduring years of severe torture including being branded by cigarettes. He and his relatives promptly told Muniswamy and family that Selvi had either committed suicide by electrocuting herself or had met with an accident caused by faulty electrical wiring.....

"Why do families like yours keep sending such girls back to their violent marital homes?" demanded activist Brinda Karat of a kinsman of Selvi's father Muniswamy, who is a landlord and panchayat president in Tamil Nadu. "You are actually signing their death warrants yourselves. Do you never feel that a girl has endured enough, and that it is time you kept her back in the safety of your own homes?"

At least two married women die within the city of Bangalore every day. These deaths are mostly registered as accidents due to stove bursts etc or as suicide due to stomach pain and the like.

In 1997, the Bangalore-based activist group Vimochana began a systematic study and investigation into the unnatural deaths of women within marriage, particularly in Bangalore. Their study revealed that from January 1997 to December 1998, over 1425 women died unnaturally in Bangalore alone. When they interviewed the parents of the deceased girls, they found that a majority believed their daughters had been either killed by burning or driven to suicide due to harassment and mental cruelty by husbands and in-laws.

"We held sittings with families all over the state, driven by the sheer necessity of exploring and exposing the depth and breadth of this sick criminality, and with a view to consolidating our findings," says Vimochana, whose activists prefer to be quoted as a collective rather than as individuals.

They received about 50 testimonies in Gulbarga, Bijapur, Bellary, Dharwad and Mangalore in June, and discovered several irregularities committed at various stages of the investigation, such as the registering of death as an accident instead of as unnatural, inadequacy in the collection and recording of evidence, and even downright inefficiency and corruption. All these led to very few perpetrators being actually convicted for murder, and a steady rise in the violent deaths of women.

They brought these cases to Bangalore for a three day public hearing in the presence of a jury of advocates, women's rights activists and retired judges, with the objective of identifying shortcomings in police investigation, medical treatment of women who are victims of domestic violence and recommending measures to protect such women in the future. At the same time, the Truth Commission, as this jury was labelled, was also to recommend to each victim's family the exact course of action they should take next, like asking for re-investigation or retrial.

The photographs of smiling brides, juxtaposed with the burnt or garroted bodies of the same women, struck a chilling note at the Institution of Engineers hall, where the hearings were being held. "A clear pattern of a nexus between the public prosecutor, the accused and the police emerged in several cases," said Flavia Agnes, leading women's rights lawyer from Bombay, who was a jurist. "We discovered cases where the public prosecutor has not even seen the case file before he appeared in court for the case!"

Vimochana is directly responsible for many of these cases coming out into the open, because they contact the burns ward of Victoria Hospital, which is where burns victims are admitted in Bangalore, and from the police, every day. All that they can get from there are the names, approximate ages and contact addresses of the women who died that day. They follow up from there, write to or visit the families of the victims and ascertain whether the women died due to genuine accidents, or whether there was any suggestion of foul play.

Often, their interventions make all the difference between a case simply lying around, and its actually being brought to court. Shobha alias Gauramma, daughter of agricultural labourers Gopal and Narayanamma of Murugamalla village, for example, was married off at the age of 14 to her own cousin Krishnappa, who is a painter and flower vendor in Bangalore. Shobha died of burns in Victoria Hospital after a two year long marriage -- during which she was continuously beaten and badgered for more dowry -- and her parents heard about it only three days later. Their attempts to get the police to pursue the case actively did not get them anywhere until Vimochana wrote to them and then met them. "Soon after, we were summoned again by the crime branch police, who seemed annoyed that we had got women activists into the picture, but also got the case moving quickly after that," says Gopal.

Many victims' families complained that the police had either threatened them and asked them to take back their cases, or offered them the option of accepting hush money from the husbands of the dead women. "In the beginning, many sorrowing parents close the doors on us, saying, 'Can you bring my daughter to bring life by making us go to court?' " says Vimochana and adds, "slowly, they start coming forward with their stories."

And several frightening facts emerged. Parents reported that the Anti Dowry Cell created by the police to investigate crimes related to dowry were shielding the accused, bribes were being demanded, and investigating agencies were often corrupt. Many burn victims died because of callous medical treatment. By moving the Karnataka assembly with their demands, Vimochana has been able to get the government to make the burns ward at Victoria Hospital a sterile zone.

Round-the-clock emergency service is now available there, and patients are graded according to the degree of burns sustained. In the next phase of their campaign against dowry related deaths, Vimochana hopes to move the government to set up a Rapid Action Force which will rush to the spot of an accident or death of such young women, and collect vital clues. They also want the government to set up a monitoring unit to co-ordinate the work of all the agencies involved in the investigation and trial of such cases. If their plans work out, then Bangalore might soon stop having the notoriety of being known for its high number of dowry deaths.

The Rediff Specials

Tell us what you think of this feature