Tag: Delhi gang-rape

Delhi Woman ‘Gang-Raped’, Then Tonsured, Paraded With Blackened Face; 4 Women Arrested

The survivor told Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal that while the three men were gang-raping her, the women present there were encouraging them.

New Delhi: A 20-year-old woman, who was was allegedly abducted and gang-raped, was tonsured, garlanded with slippers and paraded with her face blackened in Shahdara’s Kasturba Nagar area of the national capital on January 26.

Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) chief Swati Maliwal wrote on Twitter on the matter on Thursday.

“In Kasturba Nagar, a 20-year-old girl was gang-raped by illegal liquor sellers. They tonsured her, made her wear a garland of slippers and turned her face black before parading her in the entire area. I am issuing notice to Delhi Police. All criminal men and women should be arrested and the girl and her family should be given security,” the DCW chief tweeted.

According to NDTV, Maliwal met the survivor who informed her that she was abducted from her home and gang-raped by three men who are involved in illicit trade of liquor and drugs locally.

While the alleged gang rape was taking place, the women present there were allegedly instigating the men. Maliwal, NDTV further reported, was told that the men and women “beat her up brutally, shaved her head, blackened her face and made her walk around the neighbourhood with a garland of slippers and shoes.”

The police has so far arrested four women in the case after the video emerged on social media, the news outlet reported.

Also read: Clubhouse and the Fantasy of Sexual Violence Against Muslim Women

A senior police official told NDTV: “Yesterday [January 26], we received information that some women have abducted a woman, thrashed and threatened her. We rescued the victim from the accused’s house; counselling and medical of the victim was conducted.”

The survivor’s sister told the news outlet that a man living in the neighbourhood who claimed to be in love with the woman had died by suicide in November last year. His family held the woman responsible for their son’s death.

“An unfortunate incident of sexual assault on a woman due to personal enmity happened in Shahdara district. Police have nabbed four accused and the probe is on,” the Delhi Police told India Today. It further said that a first information report for gang rape has also been lodged on the complaint of the woman, and that the case is being investigated.

Woman Gang-Raped in Central Delhi’s ITO Area, Autorickshaw Driver Arrested

According to the police, the victim hails from Sambhal in Uttar Pradesh and had come to Delhi for some work

New Delhi: A 27-year-old woman was allegedly raped by three men including an autorickshaw driver in Central Delhi’s ITO area, police said on Sunday. The autorickshaw driver has been arrested for his alleged involvement in the gang rape.

The woman, who hails from Sambhal in Uttar Pradesh, in her statement to the police had alleged that she was raped by the autorickshaw driver and three others near ITO after she boarded the vehicle from the Khajuri Khas area in northeast Delhi on Saturday morning.

The woman has complained that she was taken to a room near ITO-Yamuna bridge where she was gang-raped, a police officer said. Based on the woman’s complaint at the IP Estate police station, a case of gang rape was registered and her medical examination was also conducted, the officer said.

During interrogation, the autorickshaw driver claimed that he had only called one of his friends but the woman alleged that there were two more men there, he said.

The woman is stated to be stable. Raids are being conducted to arrest the absconding accused, police said.

(PTI)

Watch | Meet the Creators of India’s First Female Superhero Comic Character

Mitali Mukherjee in conversation with Ram Devineni, the mind behind Priya, and actor Mrunal Thakur on how India’s first female superhero comic character has evolved in a pandemic year and what their short film hopes to address.

In the wake of the gruesome Delhi gang rape and murder in December 2012, US-based Director and Creator Ram Devineni created Priya – branded as India’s first female superhero – a rape survivor, to combat gender-based violence through the medium of comic strips. Since then, Priya has taken on issues like sex trafficking, acid attacks, and in the pandemic struck the year of 2020, issues like COVID-19 and mental health.

The character was named Gender Equality Champion by UN Women and the team has now released an animated short film along with the comic. Voiced by actors from India and the US like Mrunal Thakur as Priya, Vidya Balan and Rosanna Arquette as Sahas, the series hopes to address social perils amongst the youth community and create empathy and identification with survivors.

Here’s Mitali Mukherjee in conversation with Ram Devineni, the mind behind Priya, and Mrunal Thakur, actor and the voice of Priya, on how Priya has evolved in a pandemic year and what their short film hopes to address.

Book Review: How Technology Transformed Indian Media and Politics

Pamela Philipose’s book ‘Media’s Shifting Terrain: Five Years that Transformed the Way India Communicates’ takes the media consumer backstage.

The media is pervasively present in our lives as we watch TV, read newspapers and share posts on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. Most of us, however, know little about how the media industry is structured, how that effects its content, affects our sensibilities and impacts India’s democracy.

For media consumers in an era of a hyper-visible media and a mediatized everyday life, it is not surprising that the backstage of the industry is neither seen nor heard of. It is this story that Pamela Philipose’s book, Media’s Shifting Terrain: Five Years that Transformed the Way India Communicates, lays bare. It is a comprehensive account of the changes in Indian media and its politics.

Media’s Shifting Terrain
Pamela Philipose
Orient Blackswan, 2018

The introduction delineates some of the key processes that changed Indian media. Economic liberalisation saw the majority of the country’s media houses adopt a business model whereby the target audience shifted from readers/viewers to advertisers. Soon after came the rapid growth in mobile telephony and digital media. Commerce and new forms of communication redefined India. The Internet could not breach the “urban-rich, rich-poor divide”. The “nifty phone could and did”.

The consequences of this new technological inclusion in an unequal society opened up both possibilities and challenges for democracy. There are two important points that the author makes. Firstly, in a variegated and unequal society such as India, the adoption of modular practices could “potentially hollow out democratic politics”. Secondly, that a “major conundrum inherent in mediatized societies” is that “technological inclusion is easier to achieve than social inclusion”.

Both points are deftly brought out in the book. We see this play out in each of the mass movements dealt with in the book: the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement led by Anna Hazare (2011); the Delhi gang rape protests (2012-13); the Narendra Modi election campaign (2014) and, finally, the Delhi election campaigns by AAP in 2013 and 2015.

The rise of social media

The focus of the book is on five years (2011-15). Philipose terms these years the ‘mediatized half decade’, with a sharp rise in the use of the internet and smartphones, coupled with the early beginnings of Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter.

Those were momentous years. India saw media convergence bringing together older and newer media in various ways. Today, we take it for granted that newspapers also set up their own interactive websites and Facebook pages. And that media campaigns are not just an integral part but often the central arm of political parties and social movements alike. This was not always the so.

The “five years that transformed the way India communicates” is a gripping story for the author is able to capture at once the details of backstage business-politics-media nexus; the “admixture of careful strategising and spontaneous response” that marked the four mediatised events; and the new assertions of the early digital respondents reflecting a new “intensity of public engagement”.

Tempers ran high. Old and new media competed for public attention. “Sensational headlines, musical accompaniments, shaky camera work” marked television coverage. Twitter campaigns – used in a limited way in the IAC campaign – grew bigger, more strident and directly politically aligned during the gang rape protests.

Not surprisingly, elections to the Delhi assembly in 2013 and 2015 and the general elections of 2014 saw an exponential rise in the use of social media, as chapter 4, aptly titled as “Scripts, Tweets, Posts, and Verdicts”, shows.

Social media platforms. Illustration: The Wire

Media’s role in these events

The book, even as it acknowledges that the media has been a crucial factor in the aforementioned events, is careful not to essentialise this role. This is a story, therefore, not just about new communication technology or about the new “media issue attention cycle”.

Nor is it only about a new political economy defined by “professionally managed, publicly financed companies” cultivating “market confidence”. It is also about an expanding Indian middle class and the ways that the youth emerged as a key cohort for commerce and politics alike.

The “campaigns” of both the BJP and the AAP in the elections “privileged the youth factor”, whether through the “Deployment of communication technologies through apps like Thunderclap, the uploading of selfies displaying the inked finger” or “catchy songs and skits”.

The book is remarkable in the manner that it weaves in these multiple processes and moves from online to offline events. Thereby, it captures both the larger economic, political and technological developments and the feel of the “raw, youthful mediatized presence” in the four events that it addresses.

Few examples may help me make this point better. Even as the author details the IAC campaign of 2011 (chapter 2), she locates the longer and larger focus on corruption in independent India’s mainstream media reportage driven by a “combination of public interest and self-interest, feeding as it did the everyday conversations of the media-consuming middle classes and buttressing the media’s own credibility” (p.29).

With regard to the Delhi gang rape protests, she at once conveys the “reverberations in the city” as well as “media convergence”. Whereas “in the pre-digital age”, a news item of this kind would at best make it to the “next day’s evening television bulletins and the local sections of newspapers in the following morning”, here, “within a few minutes of the story appearing on newspaper edition, it was being tweeted and commented upon in multiples of hundred”. Offline, it created a “mediatized empathy”. It touched people.

Accompanying this was a coarseness of a media-driven public call for an “eye-for-an-eye” response.  This promptness in demanding instant and vigilante punishment is now part of our public culture. It fits in well with a public discourse that flourishes in a technologically-enabled world of instant access, unequal knowledge and the deliberate, vile use of fake news.

The book could not have come at a better time.

Maitrayee Chaudhuri teaches sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University and is the author of Refashioning India: Gender, Media and a Transformed Public Discourse.

Disclosure: Pamela Philipose is The Wire’s public editor.

Supreme Court Upholds Death Penalty for all Four Convicted in Jyoti Singh Gang Rape Case

“Justice demands that the courts should impose punishments befitting the crime so that it reflects public abhorrence of the crime. Crimes like the one before us cannot be looked with magnanimity.”

‘Justice demands that the courts should impose punishments befitting the crime so that it reflects public abhorrence of the crime. Crimes like the one before us cannot be looked with magnanimity.’

The Supreme Court of India. Credit: PTI

The Supreme Court of India. Credit: PTI

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the death sentence awarded by the trial court, and confirmed by the Delhi high court, to the four people convicted in the 2012 Jyoti Singh gang rape case.

The court dismissed the appeals filed by four convicts – Mukesh, Pawan, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Kumar Singh – against the Delhi high court’s order. While one juvenile completed his three-year sentence in a juvenile home, another accused, Ram Singh, committed sucide in Tihar jail.

A three-judge bench comprising Justices Dipak Misra, R. Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan, in its 429-page judgment, rejected the plea to commute the death sentence into life imprisonment. While Justice Misra wrote for himself and Justice Bhushan, Justice Banumathi wrote a separate but concurring judgment with additional reasons.

Justice Misra described the incident as a “tsunamic shock” and said it is necessary to state here that in this case, the “brutal, barbaric and diabolic nature” of the crime is evincible from the acts committed by the accused persons. He said that the nature and manner of the crime devastated social trust.

Twenty three year-old Jyoti Singh, a paramedical student who had gone with her friend to watch a film ,was brutally assaulted and raped by six persons in a moving bus in south Delhi and thrown out of the vehicle on the night of December 16, 2012. Her death sparked national outrage and spurred the passing of stricter legislation on dealing with crimes against women.

A trial court had sentenced the four to death in 2013, an order the Delhi high court had confirmed.

The bench said the death of the victim took place at a hospital in Singapore, where she had been taken to with the hope that her life could be saved. The friend of the girl survived despite being thrown outside the bus along with the girl and the attempt of the accused-appellants to run over them. .

The bench said that rape of the victim was sadistic and had been corroborated by  medical evidence, oral testimony and the victim’s dying declarations. The bench also said that the casual manner with which the victim was treated sounded like a story from a different world where humanity is treated with irreverence. Rejecting the plea for commuting the death penalty into a life sentence, the bench said the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating circumstances.

“The appetite for sex, the hunger for violence, the position of the empowered and the attitude of perversity, to say the least, are bound to shock the collective conscience which knows not what to do…Therefore, we conclude and hold that the high court has correctly confirmed the death penalty and we see no reason to differ with the same,” the bench said.

The bench also praised the Delhi police for completing the investigation in a professional manner and for bringing the culprits to book. The bench held that the charge of “conspiracy” to commit the offence of abduction, robbery/dacoity, gang rape and unnatural sex has been proved beyond reasonable doubt. The victim’s dying declaration is consistent; it has been corroborated and has found acceptance, the bench said and dismissed the appeals of the four accused.

Despite the progress made by women in various fields, respect for women is on the decline and crimes against women are on the increase, the Supreme Court said, and called for concerted efforts to prevent such crimes.

Not just woman rights, but human rights

In her separate judgment upholding the death sentence on the four accused, Justice R. Banumathi said offences against women are not just a gender issue but also a human rights one. The increased rate of crime against women is an area of concern for law-makers and this points out an emergent need to study in depth the root of the problem and remedy the same through a strict law-and-order regime. “There are a number of legislations and numerous penal provisions to punish the offenders of violence against women. However, it becomes important to ensure that gender justice does not remain only on paper,” the judge said.

She said the gang-rape shocked the nation and generated public rage. A committee headed by Justice J.S. Verma, a former chief justice of India was constituted to suggest amendments to deal with sexual offences more sternly and effectively in future. The suggestions of the committee led to the enactment of Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 which, inter alia, brought in substantive as well as procedural reforms in the core areas of rape law.

However Justice Banamuthi said a total of 3,27,394 cases of crime against women were reported in 2015, which shows an increase of over 43% in crimes against women since 2011, when 2,28,650 cases were reported. A percentage change of 110.5% in the cases of crimes against women has been witnessed over the past decade (2005 to 2015), meaning that crimes against women have more than doubled in a decade. An overall crime rate under the head, ‘crimes against women’ was reported as 53.9% in 2015, with Delhi UT at the top spot.

Justice Banumathi said “We live in a civilised society where law and order is supreme and the citizens enjoy inviolable fundamental human rights. But when an incident of gang-rape like the present one surfaces, it causes ripples in the conscience of society and serious doubts are raised as to whether we really live in a civilised society and whether both men and women feel the same sense of liberty and freedom which they should have felt in the ordinary course of a civilised society, driven by rule of law. Certainly, whenever such grave violations of human dignity come to the fore, an unknown sense of insecurity and helplessness grabs the entire society, women in particular, and the only succour people look for, is the state to take command of the situation and remedy it effectively”.

She pointed out that since the hanging of Dhananjay Chatterjee, the country has not witnessed any execution over a decade (for a non-terrorist offence) as death sentences have been commuted to life. She said stringent legislation and punishments alone may not be sufficient for fighting the increasing crimes against women. The public at large, in particular men, are to be sensitised on gender justice.

“The battle for gender justice can be won only with strict implementation of legislative provisions, sensitisation of public, taking other pro-active steps at all levels for combating violence against women and ensuring widespread attitudinal changes and comprehensive change in the existing mind set. We hope that this incident will pave the way for the same,” the judge said.

No leniency?

Justice Banumathi’s judgment also touched on the issue of the death penalty, “mitigating factors” and the convicts’ plea for leniency.

“Justice demands that the courts should impose punishments befitting the crime so that it reflects public abhorrence of the crime,” the judge said. “Crimes like the one before us cannot be looked at with magnanimity. Factors like the young age of the accused and [their] poor background cannot be said to be mitigating circumstances. Likewise, post-crime remorse and post-crime good conduct of the accused, the statement of the accused as to their background and family  circumstances, age, absence of criminal antecedents and their good conduct in prison, in my view, cannot be taken as mitigating circumstances to take the case out of the category of ‘rarest of rare cases’.”

Justice Banumathi also said that in “our tradition-bound society”, attitudinal changes and mind-set changes were needed to ensure gender justice. “Right from childhood, children ought to be sensitised to respect women. A [boy] child should be taught to respect women in the society in the same way as he is taught to respect men. Gender equality should be made a part of the school curriculum. The school teachers and parents should be trained, not only to conduct regular personality building and skill enhancing exercise, but also to keep a watch on the actual behavioural pattern of the children so as to make them gender sensitised,” she said.

Policing By the Women, For the Women, Of the Women

The Nirbhaya Mobile has the potential to be a breakthrough for women’s safety. It already has the power to issue on-the-spot zero FIRs. If it came equipped with amenities afforded to other PCR vans, and special equipment to assist women, it could provide the first point of safe contact for women who find themselves in danger.

Women police officers are put at the forefront of stopping crimes against women in Bhopal.

Women police officers are put at the forefront of stopping crimes against women in Bhopal.

Bhopal: By the time the boys saw the white gypsy, with the words Nirbhaya Patrol emblazoned on its side, it was already too late.

“Slap him,” Sub Inspector Namita Sahu ordered the boy with spiky hair. The group of dishevelled teens blinked at her, catatonic with disbelief. She said it again, pointing at the one closest: “Him. I want you to slap him.”

She was accustomed to the role of ringmaster, unfazed by the small crowd that had gathered. First, she made the boys do squats, starting the count only when they had already done fifteen. When they doubled over with exhaustion, she made them fill out a police register. Finally, as they giggled with relief, she delivered the parting shot. Bharat stepped forward, his arm lifting in the air and landing on his best friend’s ear with a limp thwack.

Had they molested a girl? I asked as we piled back in the patrol car. “No, but they look like the sort that could have,” said 32-year-old SI Sahu, from the front seat. Constable Kshama Rajput, seated across from me, said, “I used to be very nervous about slapping people too. Being with ma’am’s team has given me a lot of confidence.”

Keeping trouble off the streets

The Nirbhaya patrol, India’s first all-female police unit for fighting crimes against women, has been operational in Bhopal for a little over a year. It was inaugurated on December 16, 2013, to mark the anniversary of the fatal gang-rape of a young student in New Delhi. At the time of its inauguration, MP’s former Inspector General SK Jha called the patrol “of the women, for the women and by the women”. Its first call of duty would be coordinating with anti-ragging committees in Bhopal, to police the thin line between harassment and “friendly interaction”.

A year later, the Nirbhaya Mobile (as it is known in the city’s Police Control Room) remains the only all-female patrol in the country. The national capital’s fleet of 1000 PCR vans has only 43 cars with female officers, with rarely more than one policewoman per car. In a previous interview, ex Special Operations Commissioner TN Mohan had admitted to me that part of his hesitation to put female officers on patrol, particularly at night, was that there weren’t enough public toilets for women in the city. Most often, patrol cars with female officers in New Delhi are stationary: parked outside educational institutes or protest sites.

The Nirbhaya Mobile was originally meant to carry four constables, one sub-inspector and one driver, and respond to coordinates received from the Bhopal Women’s Helpline Number, 1090. Over the past year, however, the team has been whittled down to two female constables fresh out of training, on bi-monthly rotation, with Sahu and her driver Constable Pushpendra as its only permanent members.

“It’s better this way. The car would get too cramped before,” Sahu said. She was partially right – none of the several PCR vans I rode with in New Delhi ever carried teams of more than four or five. Unlike those cars, however, the Nirbhaya Mobile carries no first-aid kit, fire safety gear, or riot-control equipment. The only thing it came equipped with was a megaphone, a siren and the pistol Sahu wore at her waist.

It also had no specific zone of the city in which to fight crimes against women. Because cruising across all of Bhopal looking for trouble can be tiring, Sahu and Pushpendra have come up with a list of high-activity areas to patrol. These usually consist of popular college hang outs, like the Boat Club, where Sahu was disciplining boys just a few minutes ago.

Law, order and safety – one couple at a time

Sahu shares photographs of her impressive leisure activities with a large Facebook following.

Sahu shares photographs of her impressive leisure activities with a large Facebook following.

Elsewhere, all-female crime fighting squads are the stuff of fantasy. In Bhopal, the press has not always been kind to the Nirbhaya Patrol. In initial months, they were accused of not doing enough: on the anti-ragging beat, Sahu had orders from the Inspector General to end her shift at 7 pm, but reporters soon calculated that most of the 1,639 calls to Bhopal’s women’s helpline were made between 8 and 12 pm.

Soon after that, the patrol was in trouble for doing too much. It is still a common sight to see groups of young people scatter when they spot the Nirbhaya Mobile, a response to Sahu’s reputation for moral policing. Among the most widely reported instances, was a case when her team picked up two young girls for “acting suspicious” near Shahpura Lake. According to Sahu, the girls were too skimpily dressed for winter, and when their scooters were inspected, the team discovered uniforms bundled in the carriage.

Through the course of the day that we traveled together, the Nirbhaya patrol’s main tasks were asking couples not to sit too close together, and telling girls with dupattas wrapped their faces to undo them. The latter is a particularly common sight in Bhopal, given its large number of female scooterists, but Sahu and her team were convinced this was a way for girls to roam around with boys and not get caught.

I return to the image I’m still struck by: the young girls in fancy clothes and high heels, shivering on a street in January. According to reports, Sahu made them grab their ears to say sorry, called their parents, and spoke to the principal of their college. Eventually, the girls were so embarrassed and furious that they called the press to complain. What was their crime? Bunking class?

“They were getting into trouble,” Sahu assured me. “Girls these days want to be modern, but they don’t know how to be free.”

Growing up tough

Daughter to a professional wrestler who ran a liquor store in Sagar, Sahu made a fair amount of trouble as a young girl as well. On one occasion, she claims to have beaten a pair of eve-teasers at a local baraat so badly that they had to be hospitalised. On another, she was summoned to the local police station, for firing a gun to break up a fight at the family’s liquor store. The eldest of six siblings, Sahu claims her mother brought her up to be the man of the family.

“So did my grandparents. They would only buy me animal print clothes when I was small. They wanted me to be wild,” she said.

At some point, as Sahu watched Andha Kanoon with her father, the two decided she belonged in the police force. Tall, muscular, rakish; Sahu’s physical resemblance to her father is striking, and conversations about her personal life reveal the two still share a close bond. “Policemen need to be a bit like goondas, that’s the only way we can outsmart them,” she says, flexing her bicep for me to feel. She still prefers the desi kasrat her father taught her in the wrestling akhara attached to the police gymnasium, and she makes sure she snacks only on nuts and dry fruits to stay fit.

Life in Bhopal is tame by comparison. To keep herself entertained, Sahu posts updates every few hours for her huge fan following on Facebook. In some pictures she is caressing a gun; in others, riding her pet horses Bhola and Shanker. She says the closest thing she’s found to true love is her relationship with the two German Shepherds and a Rottweiler that live with her. When pressed for details, she laughed. “Who needs a man? Relationships are too stressful. Even the leader of our nation is so stress-free without a partner.”

A patrol that has lost its way

In many ways, it’s been a difficult year for the Nirbhaya Mobile. Shortly after the incident with the two college girls, Sahu’s team was shifted to Old Bhopal, where their main job was to decongest traffic snarls. Aruna Mohan Rao, the ADG for Crimes Against Women, dismissed rumours that this was a punishment posting to “clip Namita Sahu’s wings”, as local press had suggested.

The decision was purely logistical, Rao said. To cover the sprawling expanse of the city, the police department appointed another Nirbhaya Mobile in the main city, this one under Sub-Inspector Seema Rai. What happened to the new patrol? “It was a flop. No one else can do this job,” Sahu said. “Finally, I’m the only one that really cares about making a difference.”

Apart from the fact that an all-female patrol makes MP’s government appear committed to women’s safety, the Nirbhaya Mobile is a set of wheels without direction. As Delhi’s ex Special Ops Commissioner had told me, PCR vans have almost no chance of stumbling upon a crime in flagrante delicto. Ultimately, the men, flashing lights, weapons are only a show of strength — an optimistic deterrent to those still thinking about breaking the law.

Yet the Nirbhaya Mobile has the potential to be a breakthrough for women’s safety. It already has the power to issue on-the-spot zero FIRs. If it came equipped with amenities afforded to other PCR vans, as well as special equipment to assist women (rape evidence kits, sanitary towels, blankets — all essential when rescuing women who have been raped, trafficked, or hurt) it could provide the first point of safe contact for women who find themselves in danger.

Sahu has long wanted to hold self-defence classes in girls’ schools and colleges in Bhopal, but has yet to find a team ready to back her. By the time Constables Kshama Rajput and Deepa Tripathi get used to the Patrol’s working style, they will be replaced by another set of juniors. Sahu would like to pool her understanding of criminals with mental health experts and counselors, but doesn’t quite know how her seniors will react to the idea.

The Nirbhaya Mobile still attends to 1090 calls, but Sahu is exhausted by testifying in court for cases of 376 (rape) and 354 (molestation). She says that she knows the defence lawyer is only doing his job, but it’s discouraging for police officers who know they have caught a guilty person to spend days being cross-examined. Even more frustrating, Sahu says, are cases where girls drop out of the proceedings halfway: “I know when a case is false from the moment I meet a girl. But there are so many genuine cases that falter because the girl’s family is too scared, or tired, or broke to keep showing up in court.”

Some approval at last

Sub Inspector Namita Sahu back the special 'Nirbhaya' patrol, with the personal approval of her Prime Minister.

Sub Inspector Namita Sahu back the special ‘Nirbhaya’ patrol, with the personal approval of her Prime Minister.

The moment that made all the struggle worthwhile came on Holi this year, as the patrol drove past the Boat Club on its usual beat. Sahu received a call from an unidentified number asking to verify her details. A minute later, Narendra Modi was on the line. “Of course I recognised his voice!” Sahu said.

For two days after the call, nobody at the Police Department believed that Modi had actually called. On International Women’s Day, local papers confirmed the news by carrying a press release from the Prime Minister’s Office, an excerpt of which read:

“She (Sahu) got hold of herself soon after she heard the voice of Modi and then talked to him fearlessly for next six minutes. Modi lauded the work undertaken under ‘Nirbhaya’ for women’s security. He told Sahu to continue working in the same way, and become a source of inspiration for other girls.”

Sahu says the call changed everything in her life for the better. She feels appreciated for her work, at last: she hasn’t felt this good since the Nirbhaya Mobile began patrolling.

“I think he must have also felt happy after speaking to me,” she said, “I’ve asked him to bring me to Delhi. I want to work with him there and make a real difference.”

Nishita Jha is a freelance journalist and New India Foundation fellow, currently working on a book on gender violence in India.