“If the government does not do anything in the next few days, I will do what even Damini did not do. I will set myself and my sons on fire in the middle of Muzaffarnagar city,” says S on the phone, two days after two rape accused in her case were granted bail. When I had met her in July, S was about to start her ‘Stitching Training Centre’ along with her husband, determined to fight her case till justice was hers.
The Damini she refers to you may know as Nirbhaya, or more baldly as the “Delhi gangrape victim”. S was gangraped by three men from her village in Lankh on September 8, 2013, in Shamli district (see Outlook story Shadow Lines, Aug 4, 2014), but her ordeal, as well as that of hundreds of women sexually abused and gangraped, was subsumed within a broad category that came to be called ‘the Muzaffarnagar riots’. It was a madness that—according to the ‘official’ record of the Uttar Pradesh government—led to 60 deaths, seven rapes and the displacement of 40,000 people. Never mind if we could actually be looking at some 200 deaths, 1,20,000 people displaced and hundreds of unreported mass rapes.
S’s trajectory has crossed the Nirbhaya case in several ways. The Criminal Amendment Act, 2013, drafted by the Verma Commission set up in the wake of the protests following the December 16, 2012, Delhi gangrape, came into force in February 2013. While the Act introduced multiple amendments in laws related to sexual violence, lawmakers for the first time also took cognisance of the systematic violence against women during communal riots in India. As a result, a crucial amendment—Section 376(2)(g)—was included in the Indian Penal Code
Among other things, the section states, “Whoever commits rape during communal or sectarian violence shall be punished with rigorous imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than ten years, but which may extend to imprisonment for life, which shall mean imprisonment for the remainder of that person’s natural life, and shall also be liable to fine.”
The Muzaffarnagar riots broke out five months after this vital addition to the law. The violence erupted on September 7 and continued well into the next day. Seven women, all gangraped on the morning of September 8, filed cases. These would be the first in Indian history to be tried under Section 376(2)(g). The legal trajectory of these cases needs to be examined in the light of its precedent-setting import.
FIRs: The first information report for five out of the seven petitioners was filed within three weeks of the gangrapes. The sixth case was filed on October 9, 2013, while the seventh case, that of S, took the longest to register. S had sent her FIR on October 22, 2013, five weeks after the incident, to the Fugana police station in Muzaffarnagar through registered post in which she also named the three accused. The police neither filed the FIR nor acknowledged receipt of her complaint. It was only when her counsel, Vrinda Grover, who is representing the seven women in court, handed over a copy of her complaint to the lawyer representing the UP government that the FIR was filed on February 18, 2014.
Medical examination: The law mandates a medical examination within 24 hours of filing the complaint. All the seven women were gangraped on September 8, 2013. Their medical examination, however, was conducted between September 29, 2013, and February 22, 2014. It is because of this gap between the dates of the incident and the tests that the medical reports remained inconclusive in ‘proving’ rape.
The Allahabad High Court made the delay in the filing of FIRs and medical examination to grant bail on October 15, 2014, to the gangrape accused in the case of Fm, one of the seven women. It did so on grounds that “there was an inordinate delay of 14 days in filing FIR and that her testimony could not be accepted as it was not corroborated by medical evidence in the marks of injury on her body”. The state authorities chose not to appeal against this order.
Compensation: The Supreme Court, on March 26, 2014, while responding to several writ petitions related to the Muzaffarnagar communal violence, including one by Vrinda Grover and Kamini Jaiswal on behalf of the seven women, directed the UP government to pay compensation to all the seven gangrape survivors within four weeks, before April 26, 2014. The seven women had filed applications for compensation on April 9, 2014.
This compensation amounted to five lakh rupees in addition to other benefits. While five of them received the compensation on May 8, 2014, the sixth got it on May 22, 2014, and the seventh only on October 25, 2014, more than a year after the incident when counsels Grover and Jaiswal filed a contempt of court petition in the Supreme Court on September 15, 2014.
The apex court had, in addition to this compensation, also asked the UP government to provide financial and other assistance to these women to help them rehabilitate themselves. The state government, however, provided the same blanket compensation for loss of moveable and immoveable property that it provided to all families who were victims of the communal violence
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