Much shock, little progress in rape cases

The two men led the photojournalist and her colleague inside, where the latter clicked pictures and shot videos for around 45 minutes. When they reached the other end, the two men met them again. This time, one more man -- Kasim Hasim Shaikh aka Bengali – was accompanying them.

The trio said that a senior railway official saw them and therefore they would have to meet the official and explain to him what they were doing. The survivor and her colleague followed the trio. On the way, Bengali started accusing the junior colleague of having committed murder inside the mill compound.

While the survivor’s colleague denied the charge, one of the three dialled someone and informed him that they got a “prey.” Soon thereafter, two more people reached the compound, and the five took the survivor and her colleague to the mill building, tied their hands, and took turns to rape the young woman. After the assault, the accused left the two in the compound and fled. The survivor was bleeding and in excruciating pain; they took a taxi to Jaslok Hospital.

The crime stunned Mumbai. Police arrested all five – including a minor – within three days of the incident. Investigation revealed that a young telephone operator was similarly assaulted by the gang. She, however, lacked courage to report the incident and had fled to Uttar Pradesh, returning only after noticing news reports about the arrest of the accused.

Barring the minor, who was dealt with by the Juvenile Justice Board, the remaining four were tried before Mumbai sessions court. On April 4, 2014, the sessions court convicted the four, sentencing Jadhav, Shaikh and Ansari to death under Section 376(E) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for being repeat gangrape offenders. The fourth accused - Siraj Rehmat Khan aka Sirju – was sentenced to life imprisonment, as he was not involved in the telephone operator gang-rape case.

On November 25, 2021, the Bombay high court commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment. The high court said the incident shocked the conscience of society and there was a huge public outcry, but constitutional courts cannot award punishment by considering only the public outcry.

2.Two hangings that changed a UP village

BADAUN, 2014

Victims: 2; Accused: 5; Convicted: 0

By: S Raju

On May 27, 2014, the remote village of Katra Sadatganj in Uttar Pradesh’s Badaun district hit the headlines after two cousins – aged 12 and 14 – were found hanging from a tree. The two girls had gone to relieve themselves in the open as they had no toilets at home. But they never returned.

The case sparked immediate national outrage as the family, hailing from the backward Shakya community, alleged gang rape and murder.

They blamed a local resident, Pappu Yadav, along with his elder brothers Avdhesh Yadav, Urvesh Yadav and two constables of the police chowki (outpost) — Chatrapal Gangwar and Sarvesh Yadav of Katra Sadatganj police post .

A decade on, the family of the victims say their wait for justice has been long, and expensive. “We have got bundles of tareekh (court dates) in the past 10 years in the name of justice,” said the brother of

Sitting on a cot inside their semi-finished house, two brothers of the victims, along with their septuagenarian mother and the younger son of one of the brothers, curse their poverty as the biggest hurdle in their fight for justice.

“People need money to fight the case. These poor men don’t have that much money,” said their lawyer Gyan Kumar Shakya.

On May 31, police arrested the five accused. The initial post-mortem confirmed rape. By then, politics around the case had peaked as the local authorities battled charges of shielding the accused because they came from the then ruling Samajwadi Party’s biggest vote bank – Yadavs.

The case was transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in June following demands by the girls’ family. But CBI exhumed the bodies for another post-mortem and found no traces of rape. It filed a closure report in the court on February 2, 2015.

“The closure report changed the entire course of the case and dimmed the hope of seeking justice,” said Shakya.

That report was rejected on October 18, 2015. Since then the case has been in limbo. On October 28, 2015, the local court acquitted four out of five accused of charges under sections 363 (punishment for kidnapping), 366 (kidnapping, abducting or forcing a woman into illicit intercourse), 354 (outraging a woman’s modesty) of the Indian Penal Code and section 7 and 8 of the Protection of Children Against Sexual Offences Act (Pocso), which had been enacted just two years prior.

The court framed charges only against Pappu Yadav under Section 354 as CBI presented details of his telephonic conversation with one of the girls, leading to speculation that he was a stalker.

Today, Pappu Yadav is out on bail and the case is stuck between the local court and the Allahabad high court, where a petition by the accused is pending.

Pappu Yadav has shifted to Noida, where he works as a labourer. “My sons were falsely implicated. It was a fallout of caste politics,” said his father Veerpal Yadav.

The victim’s family has eight bighas of land, on which they grow vegetables. Both the brothers are labourers. Their house is dilapidated, and in a corner is a photograph of the girls – the only one preserved by the father of the younger girl. “That horrible scene still haunts me,” he said. “But this is the only picture of the cousins we have.”

The family doesn’t know how it will finance the upcoming court battle, but they won’t give up. “Hum ladenge (we will fight),” said the younger brother.

3. Rape-murder snuffs out family’s dreams

ERNAKULAM, 2016

Victim: 1; Accused: 1; Convicted: 1

By Vishnu Varma

On the night of April 28, 2016, a 30-year-old Dalit law student was found dead in her crumbling home put up on puramboke (an unassessed government plot) land on the side of a canal near Perumbavoor in the Ernakulam district of Kerala. The body, lying in a pool of blood in the middle of the room, was discovered by her mother.

The crime sent shockwaves through Kerala on account of its barbarity, the age of the victim, and the fact that she belonged to an impoverished Dalit family.

“My sister was an innocent, ambitious young woman who wanted to become a lawyer and pull her family out of poverty. Our mother wanted her to become an independent woman who would never suffer under the yoke of anyone. Instead, her life was snuffed out,” said the victim’s sister.

On June 16, 2016, police arrested Muhammad Ameer-ul-Islam, a migrant labourer from Assam, as the sole accused, from Kancheepuram in Tamil Nadu. He was charged under sections 449 (house-trespass), 342 (wrongful confinement), 376 (rape), 376a (punishment for causing death), 302 (murder), 201 (destruction of evidence) of the IPC and sections 3(1)(a), 3(1)(w)(i) and (ii) and 3(2)(v) of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities Act), 1989.

During the trial, the prosecution argued that the accused barged into the house of the victim intending to rape her. It said the accused committed a “cold-blooded murder without provocation” after the victim resisted his attempts to rape her.

On December 12, 2017, the sessions court found the accused guilty and sentenced him to death. On May 20, 2024, the Kerala high court underlined that there were no mitigating circumstances sufficient to commute the death sentence to imprisonment.

A petition was then filed in the Supreme Court, which on July 16 stayed the death sentence and asked for records of the convict’s conduct in prison.

“We got male DNA from the nail clippings of the victim, from the saliva of the bite-mark on her back and from the sleeves of the churidar she was wearing. All the DNA was of one person and matched with the accused,” said S Sasidharan, the investigating officer of the case.

The family isn’t satisfied.

The victim’s sister said she was satisfied with the verdicts of both the trial court and the high court, but bemoaned the delay in the execution of the punishment.

“If the death sentence is confirmed by the highest court of the land in a case, it must be implemented within six months. Only then will there be fear of the law in the minds of those who commit such brutal crimes. I feel it will be a deterrent to horrific crimes,” she said.

The 39-year-old said she was yet to fully come out of the shock of her sister’s horrific murder, condemning the response of her erstwhile neighbours. “We built our house far away from Perumbavoor because I couldn’t stand the constant questions and snide remarks of locals there. They would keep asking ‘what’s happening’ to the case and I was sick of it,” she said.

“Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that she’s really gone. My son especially misses her and she used to buy him a lot of clothes and toys. He still holds on to those clothes as a way to remember her.”

4. Seven years later, justice lies in cold storage

ARIYALUR, 2017

Victim: 1; Accused: 4; Convicted: 1

By Divya Chandrababu

Seven years after the gory gang rape and murder of a 17-year-old pregnant Dalit girl from Ariyalur, only one of the four accused was convicted this April.

On 29 December, 2016, the victim did not return home from work. A friend of the victim told the police that she was in a relationship with her supervisor, 24, for a year and that she was also pregnant. The victim, who studied till Class 8, worked on a construction site, bringing home ₹50-100 a day. The supervisor belonged to the Vanniyar community, an other backward class (OBC) community that is dominant in Tamil Nadu.

When investigation began on January 5, 2017, the supervisor first attempted to die by suicide. Two days later, he surrendered to the village administrative officer and confessed to murdering the victim.

It emerged that the victim wanted the accused to marry her but he refused, citing her Dalit caste. The accused then asked her to abort the child, but she refused.

The accused then gathered three of his cousins, abducted her, and took her two villages away, where they took turns to rape her. Then they used a blade to attack her, killed her, weighted her body with a large stone, and dumped her in a dry well.

Her severely decomposed body was found inside a well on January 14, 2017. “Her mother fainted at the sight of her child. We still think about it every day,” the victim’s family member said.

The accused were booked under the Goondas Act (Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Bootleggers, Drug Offenders, Gamblers, Goondas, Immoral Traffic Offenders and Slum-Grabbers Act), under SC and ST (Prevention Of Atrocities) Act, 1989 and the Pocso Act (Protection of Children From Sexual Offences Act).

Trial began in 2019. In April, a district court sentenced the main accused – the supervisor – to a life term under Sections 364 (kidnap), 302 (murder) and 201 (destroying evidence) of the Indian Penal Code, Section 10 of the Pocso Act and sections 3(1) (w) (i) of the SC/ST Act with a fine of ₹52,000. The judge acquitted the other three for lack of evidence.

Special public prosecutor S Abiraman said the convict appealed the verdict. “We are also going for an appeal against the acquittal,” he added.

But the family is distraught. “For years we waited for justice. We have not been able to eat or sleep properly. And now three out of the four have gone scot-free,” said a relative of the victim who asked not to be named.

5. A UP strongman and a grisly crime

UNNAO, 2017

Victim: 1; Accused: 1; Convicted: 1

By Rohit Kumar Singh

She was 17 when she went to the house of Unnao strongman Kuldeep Singh Sengar in search of a job, and he raped her. Yet, for a long time, no one would believe her.

She attempted to file a first information report against the then Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lawmaker on charges of rape, but to no avail. She then wrote an open letter to chief minister Yogi Adityanath, recollecting the events.

But she never heard back.

Her father was then sent to jail on April 7, 2018 for allegedly possessing illegal firearms. In jail, he was repeatedly assaulted. Desperate, she immolated herself in front of the chief minister’s response on April 9, 2018. A day later, her father died due to internal injuries caused to him due to alleged brutality in police custody.

A spark was lit. Protests swept the nation. The next day, a case was registered under the Indian Penal Code’s sections 376 (rape), 504 (intentional insult), and 506 (criminal intimidation).

On April 14, Sengar was taken into custody.

The former BJP MLA was sentenced to life term for rape by a Delhi court on December 20, 2019. A court later sentenced Sengar and others for the culpable homicide of her father on March 13, 2020.

Despite succeeding in getting Sengar convicted, the victim has found herself uprooted from Unnao, where the former MLA’s palatial residence is less than 100m from her house. They now live in a rented accommodation in Delhi.

“I have been living in Delhi since 2018, but the suffering for my family is still not over. My uncle faced criminal charges and is languishing in jail for the past three years. Even villagers were against my family, and we could not go back there due to security reasons,” she said.

Emotional trauma has taken a toll. “It is almost impossible to restore normal life, as it was in my village in Unnao,” she added.

But she is hopeful. “We must continue to fight for a world where women can live without fear of violence and harassment.”

6. A string of lapses in ‘encounter’ killings

HYDERABAD, 2019

Victim: 1; Accused: 4; Convicted: 0

By Srinivasa Rao Apparasu

What should be the police’s role in a rape investigation?

This question was at the core of the furore surrounding the rape and murder of a 26-year-old veterinarian who was gang raped allegedly by four men on November 27, 2019; the men allegedly later burnt her to death at Chattanpalli village near Shadnagar town, about 30 km away.

Within 48 hours, the Cyberabad police arrested the four accused – Mohd Arif, Chintakunta Chennakesavulu, Jollu Shiva and Jollu Naveen; the first two were lorry drivers and the others were cleaners. But as outrage mounted over the gruesome crime, the investigation took an unexpected turn.

In the early hours of December 6, 2019, the police killed all four in an encounter, claiming self defence. The Cyberabad police received wide appreciation for the move. Petals were showered on the officials.

The family of the veterinarian hailed the encounter, stating that the accused got their punishment quickly. “Our daughter will never come back. But today’s incident (the encounter) has alleviated some of our pain,” her father said.

Her younger sister, who was the last to speak to the veterinarian, felt that the trial would go on for years and years, and finally, the accused would be sentenced to death. “But killing them in an encounter was a surprise. I hope it will help prevent similar crimes in the future,” said.

But did it?

As doubts gathered over the encounter, non-governmental organisations moved the Supreme Court, alleging that the encounter was fake. On December 12, a Supreme Court bench headed by then Chief Justice of India SA Bobde appointed a three-member commission headed by former SC judge justice VS Sirpurkar to inquire into the encounter.

The Sirpurkar Commission report was made public on May 20, 2022. The panel found fault with 10 police officers and recommended registering cases under Section 302 MURDER? of IPC.

The Supreme Court referred the case back to the Telangana high court, asking it to examine the Sirpurkar Commission report and deliver its verdict. Seven of the 10 officers moved a separate bench of the high court, seeking suspension of the report. On May 1, 2024, a single-judge bench of the high court suspended the report.

Senior counsel B Rachna Reddy, who argued the case on behalf of the police officials, said the HC also directed the state government to refrain from taking any coercive measures using the report. But senior advocate P V Krishnamachary, who argued the case earlier on behalf of the families of the four encounter victims, disagreed with the order.

“The police officials did not include the victims’ families as respondents, so that the high court could hear their version. The interim orders were given in favour of the cops unilaterally,” Krishnamachary said.

The rape victim’s family has gone virtually incognito since the incident. But the family members of the accused are still running from pillar to post. “My son was innocent and he was killed in a fake encounter. We thought we would get justice,” said Chintakunta Jayamma, the mother of Chennakesavulu.

Jollu Rajappa, the father of Jollu Shiva, said he was confident of getting justice. “We want the court to award the death sentence to the policemen who killed my son,” he said.

7. In Hathras, life now in police cordon

HATHRAS, 2020

Victim: 1; Accused: 4; Convicted: 1

By Hemendra Chaturvedi

For four years, they’ve been living in a virtual cage. The Dalit family in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras – where a 19-year-old girl was gang-raped and murdered in September 2020 – is living under a cordon of police protection, waiting for justice. But the wait now seems to be unending.

“We continue to live under security cover with half a dozen security personnel. But three of the accused are moving free,” said one of the brothers of the victim.

“Three minor daughters of my brother are unable to attend school as we fear backlash in this village which is dominated by upper caste people,” he added.

On September 14, 2020, the 19-year-old was gang-raped allegedly by four Thakur men. She was first taken to a local hospital, and then to Delhi, where she died on September 29, 2020.

The family alleged that the police delayed in registering an FIR and also told them to take the victim away. In her dying declaration on September 22, 2020, the victim alleged gang rape and named four of the accused – Sandip Sisodia aka Chandu, Ravi aka Ravindra, Ramu aka Ram Kumar and Lav Kush – all from the Thakur community.

But the family’s ordeal didn’t end with her death. In the dead of the night at 2.30am on September 30, the police cremated the victim allegedly without the consent or knowledge of her family. This sparked furore, especially among Dalit groups that saw the incident as yet another example of caste discrimination by the administration.

CBI charge-sheeted the four accused under IPC sections 376 (rape), 376A (causing death or leaving victim in vegetative death), 376D (gangrape) and 302 (murder) besides Section 3(2)(v) (offence against SC/ST) of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.

But in March 2023, three of the four men were set free by the Hathras court. The fourth one - Sandeep Sisodia - was found guilty of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and under sections of the SC/ST Act but not of rape.

Today, all three male members of the victim’s family are unemployed. “Two of my married daughters avoid coming home or visit here for a short time as this place is not a normal house with men in uniform at the gates,” said the father of the victim.

The family hopes that the government shifts them away from the village, and gives them a job. The appeals of the families of the victim and the accused before the Allahabad high court are also pending. But they’re not holding their breath.