Despite facing intimidation and stigma, she courageously pursued the legal battle, becoming a symbol of resilience against all odds.
It was around 8:30 pm on September 7, 2013 that Shama (name changed to protect identity) heard an ominous call from a loudspeaker in her village in Muzaffarnagar. The voice behind the loudspeaker was instigating local Hindus to unite against Muslims and avenge the deaths of two Hindu youths in Kanwal village in the same district. The fear of mortal harm sent Shama and her family into panic mode.
Along with her husband (a tailor), two sons aged five and three and other relatives, Shama’s family decided to escape to neighbouring Shamli district through the sugarcane fields. However, three Hindu Jat men from the village turned up in their locality and assured them that there was no danger whatsoever. The three men, Sanjeev, Deshpal and Sobran, even spent the entire night in their lane to restore the confidence of the Muslim families with whom they had co-existed peacefully for generations.
That was perhaps the last act of communal harmony in Shama’s village before it was engulfed in violence. Both Muslims and Jats used to frequent her husband’s tailoring shop. Shama would herself chip in with the work by stitching clothes for women from home.
The next morning, September 8, at around 10:30 am, Shama’s husband, who ran a small tailoring unit from a rented shop, rode a tempo and went to Shamli to get his elder son checked by a doctor. The boy was running a high fever. Just an hour after that, some men came frantically running into Shama’s house and informed her that riots had erupted. Rumour spread that a Muslim man had been killed near a mosque.
With her three-year-old in her arms, Shama followed the rest of her family and neighbours and frantically dashed to first take shelter in the sugarcane fields and eventually decided to keep going till they reached Shamli where their extended family lived. But she was left behind. Her child would not stop crying as the sharp blades of the sugarcane plants rubbed against his tender body.
“I had a baby in my arms. I had also never seen the path through the fields before. It was all unfamiliar for me. I mostly stayed at home,” she says, recalling the incident.
While several persons were killed in the ensuing communal violence in Muzaffarnagar and neighbouring regions, 62 as per official records, there were also allegations of sexual assault of Muslim women by the violent mobs. Shama was among them and the only one who continued to fight for justice despite all odds.
Three men caught hold of Shama and gangraped her in the sugarcane fields at gunpoint while threatening to kill her child by placing a knife on his throat. On May 9, a sessions court in Muzaffarnagar convicted two men Sikandar and Maheshvir for gangraping Shama, almost ten years after the incident.
A third accused, Kuldeep, died during the trial. The court convicted the two men under 376-D (gangrape), 376(2)(g) (rape during communal violence) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The convicts were handed rigorous imprisonment of 20 years and concurrent fines.
Shama puts up a steely face. She is relieved that her rapists got convicted by law. But the scars of that brutality, displacement from home and the ensuing legal fight run deep. The sugarcane fields are forever etched in her mind as a bitter crime scene. “Bahut nuksaan jhela hain dus saalon mein (We faced a lot of losses in these 10 years,” she says.
After keeping the incident under wraps for several days due to fear as well as social stigma in a highly conservative and patriarchal society, Shama confided in her husband. “My husband fully supported me,” says Shama. But others were not so empathetic. “When people living around us found out that I had been raped, they started to maintain a distance from us. They started preventing their daughters from visiting me. ‘Don’t go to this woman’, they would tell their girls,”recalled Shama. “I would feel terrible hearing all that. I would burst into tears. I didn’t choose to be raped, did I?”
Shama now has three children. This was her second marriage. Her first husband who lived in the same village had divorced her. Her frequent trips to court for hearings during the trial created another predicament in her life as her children were growing up and started asking questions. “My children would ask me why do I go to court. I would tell them that during the riots our house and village were set on fire and ransacked. I go to court to recover our lands captured by others,” says Shama.
The violence caused several villages to be emptied of their Muslim residents. Thousands had to endure life in makeshift camps before moving to rented houses or managed to build new homes with help of civil society. Shama now lives in a single-room house measuring 50-yards in Shamli. In her village, the family had more space—250 yards and room even to rear a buffalo.
A lot has changed for the family since the 2012 riots, mostly for the worse. From facing regular intimidation and pressure to withdraw the case and taking arduous trips to the court hearings in both Muzaffarnagar district headquarters as well as Delhi to financial downturn, they witnessed it all.
The schooling of her children got disrupted during the turmoil and back and forth from Delhi. Her husband’s tailoring work with regular customers and familiarity was disturbed after the family was forced to relocate to a new place in Shamli. Like most other Muslim families displaced after the riots, they too were scared to return home.
The legal fight, which led to the first conviction under sexual assault related to the 2013 communal violence, also took a mental toll on Shama. It was only after she approached the Supreme Court for expeditious disposal of the trial that her case reached conclusion.
The case witnessed a “deliberate and protracted delay meant to exhaust” her, says senior lawyer Vrinda Grover who fought Shama’s case. From the inception of the case, it had witnessed partisan investigation, said Grover, who took the matter to the Supreme Court in May 2014. Following this intervention, a case was registered at the local police station.
This was probably the first case of conviction under 376(2)(g) IPC pursuant to the 2013 Criminal Law Amendment, which recognised rape during communal violence as a specific offence, said Grover.
Shama knew her rapists. They would often visit her husband’s shop to get clothes stitched. “I remember, they would enter our place without even knocking,” she says.
During cross-examination, the lawyers for the accused men would often ask her intrusive, humiliating questions and triggering details of the incident. This is an old strategy to discredit narrations by alleged rape victims. However, the judge found her evidence to be of “sterling” quality and consistent. “They would ask me strange questions and were often rude, especially on the final day. They would ask me: where was I raped; in which direction was my house; which way did I face; and how tall were the sugarcane crops and how wide were the fields.”
In his 89-page judgment, additional sessions judge Anjani Kumar referred to Shama’s struggle to save her child before she was caught by the rapists.
She frantically ran into the fields to save herself and her son after she was left behind. The village was located around 2 km from the site where she was raped. Noting that she carried her son in her lap, the judge said this depicted the "hard effort and poignant struggle of a mother" to save herself and her son.
However, despite her relentless struggle, when she was a about to reach the main road, she fell into the clutches of the accused Kuldeep, Maheshvir and Sikandar who were armed with a knife and a pistol and were hovering there in search of hapless women, said the judge.
Shama said she hid behind the school but the three men spotted her and dragged her into the fields. The accused men snatched her child from her and raped her after threatening her to kill her son. As they put a knife on her son's throat, the three took turns to rape her, she said in her complaint.
The convicted men can approach higher courts to challenge the verdict. But Shama’s lawyers feel the judgment is water-tight but also laments that without the intervention of activists, victims like Shama would not get due support. “The criminal justice system is not working on its own. If a woman needs justice, she needs to put her sanity and the sanity of her kids and family on the line. That should not be the case. We will not accept this demand of the criminal justice system,” said Grover.