A day in the life of Bhagana Survivors - Delhi and Hisar - 4th June 2014, Wednesday
t was a day when the 16th LOKSABHA started it's session with a condolence meeting to adjourn the house in the memory of one of it's members and minister.
t was a day when the 16th LOKSABHA started it's session with a condolence meeting to adjourn the house in the memory of one of it's members and minister.
On the other side , incidents of atrocities on homeless Dalit families from Bhagana and other protesters marked the day with eviction, batons and insulting women at the Parliament street in NEW DELHI.
It was only 6 am when a thousand police men barged into the tents of the Jantar Mantar, a permanent protest site for years since the protesters and whistle blowers were banned to gather at Parliament street. The huge barricading forces people to put their sit in protest or hold the rally at the Jantar Mantar, a site, officially granted by the Delhi police and administration. The police men came, they dismantled the tents, picked the belongings of the protesters including the Bhagana rape survivors and their families and warned them to vacate the whole area by noon. Almost more than 600 protesters, rallying for their demands since long time, were put on the roadside without anything at hand. No water, not even a mat to sit or shed to face the scorching sun.
By 8.30 am, another news came from Hisar where 200 Bhagana families were living ourside Hisar's mini secretariat since last 2 years, have been evicted in the same manner by the local police, their belongings were taken by the police, they were thrown on the street with no shelter and yet the state government has to take steps to send them back to their village and grant their entitlement of the common land and other constitutional rights.
By 11 am people in solidarity started gathering at the Jantar Mantar in Delhi. The protesters were in great distress. It was decided to hold a demonstration in front of Parliament Street police station at 2 pm. A memorandum was sent to the home minister and a momorandum is being sent to the police Commissioner of Delhi requesting them not to vacate Jantar Mantar as this is the only physical space to raise voice against atrocity and repression in the capital.
At 2 pm, hundreds of men, women and children gathered at parliament street to protest the eviction drive. And how the protesters at the police station faced the wrath of the police force? Find below a few posting of our friends in arms who were there and faced the police's brutality themselves with other Bhagana women.
I spoke to various political parties people about this eviction and by now only AAPA has issued a statement in Delhi and Haryana both. ( At the bottom)
AISA's statement can also be read below.
At the end , read an excellent piece on Bhagana rape case written by a journalist friend Neha Dixit who went to Bhagana and reported from the ground. You will feel horrible and angry at the ground realities of our rural India.
The questions arise :
On what ground the Delhi Police evicted the Jantar Mantar when legally they have to issue a notice well in advance and that too in an extraordinary circumstances. The police in the morning came without notice and broke all the rules. In the rally they molested women demonstrators and most of them were not even wearing their badges.
Please share this mail ( in the form of write up, postings too ) with maximum number of people and the agencies concerned with human rights.
Solidarity,
Kiran Shaheen
Pyoli Swatija on her facebook at 4.30pm
Neha Dixit, May 31, 2014
The gangrape of the four Dalit girls in Bhagana is a brazen cocktail of caste, crime and feudal mindsets.
On April 17, the day India was polling at 121 constituencies in the fifth phase of the ongoing General Elections, four girls and 100 families from their community parked themselves in protest in central Delhi.
These four girls were gang raped on March 24, this year and belong to the Dalit community of Bhagana village, in Hisaar, 150 km from Delhi. Dalits are regarded as untouchables and occupy the lowest rung in the Hindu hierarchical order. They have been identified under the Scheduled Caste category in the Indian constitution.
Huddled in an unhindered mass under three tents behind Jantar Mantar, there is an unfamiliar spring in their demeanor. Far less demure than the stereotypes of rape survivors, they are brimming with hope and the glow of a persistent, collective struggle.
The only Dalit square in the village which was razed by the Jat community and led to protests.
“I was revising my lessons while going for a dump that evening. I had to sit for the English exam the next day,” recalls Manju, 13, a student of sixth standard, one of the four girls, with the characteristic assertion of a teenage girl. Close to 60 percent of the households in Bhagana village still don’t have a toilet. Daily, early in the morning or late in the evening, women collect in groups to go to the agricultural fields to defecate. It is then, she along with three other girls were abducted and forced to sniff something that made them unconscious. Out of the five who abducted them, four were relatives of the leaders of the dominant Jat community in Bhagana. Sunita, then in her half unconscious state was stripped, beaten and raped by the boys one after the other. They did the same to the other three girls. “I could barely open my eyes, forget resisting the boys,” she says.
Their next memory is of the Bhatinda railway station, a city 150 km away from Hisaar. Their clothes were torn, had injury marks on their bodies and walked in pain. “I asked people on the platform if they knew who left us there but since they spoke in Punjabi, a language I am unfamiliar with, I didn’t get them,” recalls Ranjana, 18, with a newly acquired maturity. Sunita, 16 and Kamini, 17 sit behind them and listen intently. The four are surrounded by their mothers and women who look at me disapprovingly. “What is the point of you coming here? We have been sitting in this heat for a month but still to no avail. I thought protests in Delhi lead to result like the Damini case,” asked Laajo Rani in a Haryanvi dialect. She is 80 years old. I tell her, “It is because of the ongoing elections.” She answers, “So, don’t we vote and make winning candidates?” Guilt overtakes and I turn to Manju.Manju is dressed in a white salwar kameez with pink dots and a crimson scarf. The scarf is comfortably settled on her head out of habit, like many girls her age in rural Haryana yet she constantly struggles to tuck it behind her ear to cover her face from the photojournalists outside the tent. “We had to drop out two years back, she was the only one still managed to go to school,” joins Ranjana.
Bhagana village is 300 years old. The houses of the four girls are diametrically opposite to each other on the outskirts of the village. Bhagana is dominated by the feudal, land owning Jat community that makes up for 59 percent of the village population. Dalits, which include several sub categories like Dhanuks, Chamars, Kumhaars and others, make up for the 24 percent population. They are landless and mostly work as agricultural labourers in the farms of Jat community. They are also considered untouchables. People from the upper castes, including the Jat community, neither eat or drink at their place nor are they allowed to sit next to an upper caste person.
In March 2012, the Jat community under the leadership of Panghal Khap-the one of the many clans of the community to which all the Jats of the village belong, announced a ‘bandi’ on the Dalits of the village. ‘Bandi’ is a social and economic boycott. This was a response to the Dalit protest against the decision of the constitutionally elected panchayat headed by Rakesh Panghal, also a Jat, to allocate the common land of the village to members of Jat community. This included the playground on the outskirts, close to the Dalit inhabitation and the Dalit meeting square in the centre of the village. “In addition, the common ground that was divided into plots to be given away to villagers was given for free to the members of the Jat community but not to the Dalits even when they were forced to pay Rs 1,000 each for allocation,” says Balraj Sindhu, a Dalit member of Centre for Trade Union from the village. There was a massive protest by the Dalits within the village against this injustice which did not sync with the Jat-Dalit traditional power equations in the village. “They dissented against those who gave them employment and means for survival. Such people must leave the village,” says Kundan Panghal, a Jat farm owner and activist of the Panghal Khap.
The boycott included a ban on the use of all common resources in the village including water resources like wells, barbers, local transport, grocery shops, schools, access to cattle feed, access to roads passing through the Jat areas and employment in the agricultural fields.
Like several parts in Haryana, there is an existing labour practice in Bhagana village which is called Seeri. Under the Seeri system, an agricultural labourer is hired by a land owning farmer on an annual contract for close to Rs 40,000 per year, which comes to about Rs. 110 a day, way below the minimum wage of Rs. 230 a day in Haryana. They are paid the money in advance and are bonded for a year. Apart from the agricultural work, the labourers are often made to do other household related work with no fixed hours. In 1953, the Punjab Security of Land Tenures Act was implemented in Haryana which provides complete security of tenure for tenants in continuous possession of land over 15 acres for 12 years and grants tenants optional right of purchase of ownership of non-resumable land. The Seeri system negates the possibility of the proof of continuous occupation of the land as a tiller since the contracts are renewed every year. “Off late, the labourers had started rejecting the exploitative practices under Seeri like no fixed hours of work and the extra work apart from agriculture that the employers forced them to do,” says Sindhu. This was not just a threat to the age old social hierarchy in the village but was also disturbed the economic privileges the farm owning Jat employers enjoyed.
“The next two months, we tried very hard to stay. Even NREGA programs which could have given us employment in spite of the boycott have not been functional in the village,” recalls Dharamveer, a 40 year old Dalit mason. NREGA is the Central government sponsored scheme that guarantees 100 days of employment to all. “On May 21st, when the Jat community announced another ‘bandi’ with even stricter norms, 137 families decided to move to the mini secretariat in Hisaar district to demand action from the authorities,” he adds.
The playground next to the Dalit inhabitation is now used for storing cow dung by the Jat community.
Two years have passed and to this day, close to 90 families still occupy the protest spot in Hisaar but no action has been taken. During this period, the police failed to register even a single complain under the Scheduled Caste and scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. To add to it, in September 2012, the police booked a few people protesting at the Mini secretariat for sedition and ‘exciting disaffection towards the government established by law’ and imprisoned them for a week. This included five children, 8, 9, 10, 12 and 14 years old along with three adults.
Meanwhile, the hostility towards 200 Dalit families still left at the village had increased manifold. The worst affected were the women because all the things boycotted were directly related to the household. “Apart from fetching water from far off and managing groceries with limited access, the biggest loss was lack of employment for us. Because of the ban imposed on our community as agricultural workers, the men could go to the city and neighbouring villages to work but women were confined to their homes,” says Rattal Sindhu, 55, grandmother of three who has been an agricultural labour for thirty years in this village. “In most of the houses, the household income has been halved,” she adds.
The schools did not remain untouched. There are two schools in the village, a private one which the children of the Jat community, who could afford to pay high fees attended and the government one, attended mostly by the children of the Dalit community. “After the boycott in 2012, many girls had to drop out because of the eve teasing they had to face while coming to the school. It has increased in the last two years. Some Jat boys enrolled in the school would kick our boys and humiliate them,” tells Satya Narayan, the headmaster of the government school. “I even threatened to shut the school but not allow this kind of discrimination but it did not help. As the protest at Hisaar kept catching headlines in the media, the aggression and enmity towards the Dalit kept increasing in the village,” he adds. Manju was still a student of this school, the other three had drop out in 2012. The news of their gang rape was the last nail in the coffin. After another set of 100 families moved to Delhi to protest, the school is lying vacant. The only Dalits left here are still bonded under Seeri, who under pressure of the Jat community have stopped sending their children.
On 24th March, while the girls were figuring out how to go back home from the Bhatinda railway station, they saw the village head Rakesh Panghal walking towards them with three influential Jat leaders. “The night the girls went missing, we went to Rakesh to inform him and ask for help. He told me that our girls will be back tomorrow morning. He knew where the girls were which was shocking,” says Bheem Singh, father of Ranjana. Next morning, the fathers of the four girls and Rakesh Panghal and some others got into two jeeps and reached Bhatinda railway station.
Panghal reached the exact platform where the girls were waiting. When the girls saw him, they first tried to hide. “It is only when we saw our fathers on the other platform with the aides of Panghal is when we came out,” says Kamini. The four girls were rushed into a car with Panghal and their fathers. On the Mirzapur road, the car was stopped at a roadside café. The girls were seated on the first floor as the others had tea on the ground floor. Rakesh Panghal walked to the first floor with his uncle and slapped Sunita. “Your community people think that they can contest the Jats? What was done to you is a lesson for raising a voice against us. If you dare complain against anyone or identify any of the boys, your families will be killed,” says Manju. Soon after, they left for the village. The next day, the four girls, their fathers and some members of the Dalit community reached the police station. On March 25, after a lot of struggle and protest, the police registered a report for rape and medical tests that confirmed rape were conducted. The five accused Sumit, Lalit, Sandeep, Dharamvir and Kuldeep-all of them Jats-were arrested on March 29. The next hearing is in the Supreme Court of India on May 7th.
Rakesh Panghal, when asked about the accusations of the Dalit community replies, “These girls are known to have multiple love affairs. How can they be trusted?” When asked about the illegal allocation of the land and the social boycott, he says, “They are all lying. They have left their houses on their own to extract unjustified compensation from the government.” The same justification was given by influential Jat leaders when the houses of several Dalits were burnt and two were killed in the Mirchpur village of Hisaar district in 2010.
Kaviraj, the Superintendent of Police, Hisaar district says, “The police has taken every care to follow legal proceedings. I cannot comment anymore since the case is now subjudice.”
ML Kaushik, the District Collector of Hisaar also remains non-committal. “The people sitting in protest have been politically motivated. We have requested them to return to their houses but to no avail,” he says.
According to the National Crime Record Bureau, the number of rapes of Dalit women across the country has increased by 15.4 percent in one year. Only one in eight cases of atrocities on Dalits, a person gets convicted in Haryana.
In 1931, when Mahatma Gandhi asked BR Ambedkar, the champion of Dalit rights and the father of the Indian constitution why is he so critical of the Congress, the leading party in the freedom movement, demanding an independent homeland, he replied, “ Gandhiji, I have no homeland. No untouchable worth the name will be proud of this land.”
As India is set to conclude the greatest dance of democracy on May 16, Dalits- who represent 16 percent and women-who represent 48 percent of the Indian population still need to struggle at Jantar Mantar. Explains what Ambedkar meant.
Names of the Rape Survivors have been changed.
Press Release June 4,2014
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) strongly condemns the forcible eviction of four rape victims and their families by the Delhi Police from the Jantar Mantar on Wednesday (June 4) morning.
The young Dalit rape victims aged between 13-18 years from Bhagana village in Hisar district of Haryana, were on protest along with their family members and relatives at the Jantar Mantar from April 6, since they have been denied justice and their lives are in danger in their village.
It is extremely shocking that instead of taking concrete steps to provide justice to these poor and helpless people, the Delhi administration and the city Police behaved in such an inhuman manner, which defies logic and puts the national capital to shame.
The AAP demands that the Lieutenant Governor and the union home ministry should take immediate steps to ensure the safety of these four girls and their families. Priority should be given to the rehabilitation of these families.
The Delhi Police commissioner, Lieutenant Governor and the union home minister should immediately apologise to the rape victims and their families for the unjustified humiliation they had to suffer.
Delhi Police and the city administration need to be reminded that the Delhi High Court has time and again made it clear that prohibitory orders against any protest at Jantar Mantar (imposition of section 144 of the Code for Criminal Procedure commonly called the CrPC) can only be imposed in emergency situations and not always.
The BJP-led NDA’s new central government, whose home ministry directly controls the Delhi Police, needs to urgently tell it that the Delhi High Court had made it clear after the December 16 Nirbhaya case that Section 144 CrPC cannot be imposed by the Police at will.
The High Court had on January 3, 2013, observed :“There are rights to movement and speech and expression, it (Section 144 of the CrPC) cannot be used just like that...otherwise it would lead to loss of the sanctity,” the bench headed by the then Chief Justice D Murugesan had stated.
The AAP demands that the home ministry should make it clear to the Delhi Police that section 144 cannot be imposed except in emergency situations to maintain law and order.
The AAP is of the clear view that right to protest is a fundamental right and it cannot be banned. At the most, there can be some reasonable restrictions on holding protests. New Delhi, being the centre of power, is the most appropriate place to hold protests and the government cannot put a blanket ban on it.
2 Attachments
आम आदमी पार्टी, हरियाणा
हरियाणा के भगाना गाँव की चार लड़कियों के साथ हुए बलात्कार के मामले में धरना दे रहे पीड़ित परिवारों को आज सुबह दिल्ली के जंतर मंतर से पुलिस ने जबरदस्ती हटा दिया | वहीँ हरियाणा के हिसार सचिवालय में दो साल से धरने पर बैठे भगाना के दलित परिवारों को पुलिस ने जबरदस्ती उठाया | आम आदमी पार्टी, हरियाणा हिसार व दिल्ली पुलिस की कार्रवाई की कड़े शब्दों में निंदा करती है | पार्टी के विचार में पुलिस की यह कार्रवाई पीड़ित परिवारों के लोकतान्त्रिक अधिकारों का साफ़ साफ़ हनन है, जिसे स्वीकार नहीं किया जा सकता|
आम आदमी पार्टी, हरियाणा चिंता व्यक्त करती है कि जब धरना दे रहे परिवारों की पीड़ा को सुनना चाहिए था, उस समय अपनी आवाज उठाने के शांतिमय तरीके को उनसे छिना गया है | दिल्ली में अभी अभी सरकार बनी है जो आम जन की रहनुमाई करने का दम भरती है, उसी पार्टी का दावा है कि हरियाणा में भी सरकार बनायेंगें | सभी राजनितिक दल केंद्र व राज्य सरकार के इस अलोकतांत्रिक व्यवहार पर चुप रह कर हरियाणा की जनता को क्या सन्देश देना चाहते है | दूसरी तरफ हरियाणा में कांग्रेस सरकार को हरियाणा की जनता ने सन्देश दिया है, वह अब भी दलित समाज के लोकतान्त्रिक अधिकारों को भी छिनने में लगी है | सरकार द्वारा पीड़ितों की आवाज सुनने की बजाए पुलिस की मदद से पीड़ितों पर टूट पड़ना कांग्रेस के दलित कार्ड की असलियत सामने ला देता है | भगाना के दलित परिवारों के संघर्ष के समय चुप रहने वाली सभी पार्टियों से हरियाणा की जनता जवाब जरूर मांगेगी |
चिंता का विषय यह भी है कि जब देश भर में अन्याय के खिलाफ आवाज तेज होती जा रही है उस समय हरियाण के दलितों व हाशिये के लोगों की आवाज को दबाने के लिए सरकार क्रूरतम तरीके अपना रही है| हरियाणा सरकार ने इस तरह से अपना दलित विरोधी चेहरा उजागर कर दिया है | जब प्रदर्शनकारी महिलाओं व बच्चों को भी सड़क पर ला दिया गया |
आम आदमी पार्टी, हरियाणा राज्य में शोषण के शिकार लोगों को न्याय दिलाने के आन्दोलन में हमेशा साथ होने का भरोसा दिलाती है | पार्टी स्पस्ट करना चाहती है कि राज्य व देश में आवाज उठाने के अधिकार की रक्षा के लिए संघर्ष करती रहेगी | पार्टी चिंता जाहिर करती है कि हरियाणा व दिल्ली की सरकार 21वीं सदी में भी पुलिस राज को स्थापित करने का सपना पाल रहीं हैं जिसे जनता साकार नहीं होने देगी |
आम आदमी पार्टी, हरियाणा व दिल्ली पुलिस के एक्शन की निंदा करते हुये मांग करती है कि भगाना के दलित परिवारों को न्याय दिया जाये | पीड़ित परिवारों की शिकायत सुनी जाये व आरोपियों के खिलाफ कार्यवाही कि जाये | कहीं भी न्याय मांगने वालों के धरना देने व प्रदर्शन करने के अधिकार को कुचला न जाये| जैसा कि भगाना के पीड़ित परिवारों के साथ दिल्ली व हिसार में किया गया है | आन्दोलनकारी लोगों को आन्दोलन करने का अधिकार बहाल किया जाये |
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