The thumbnail shows the house of the Bansals in Model Town, where the victim used to work and was allegedly raped and murdered.
Credit: Sagar, Shahid Tantray, and Prabhjit Singh
Source: The Caravan
“In 2020, a 17 year old domestic worker from the Nishad community (OBC) was found dead in her employer Drupadi Bansal’s house in Model Town, Delhi: Hours after she had called her foster-mother alleging mistreatment.
Before any sufficient investigation could take place, the police claimed she had died by suicide. Her body was kept away from her family & forcefully burnt.The full post mortem wasn’t given to them either.
Instead, when her community demanded answers from the Bansals, they were allegedly arrested, assaulted & tortured in custody where the police threatened them with false cases if they dared to file an FIR.
The victim’s family believes that she was raped & murdered at her employers home (Bansal). Instead of investigating this, the police allegedly inflicted brutal abuse on them while protecting the Bansals.
Domestic workers, especially those who are Bahujan women, are treated as dispensable. Their rights, dignity, & safety in the workplace are denied everyday. Systemic erasure of violence is victim blame. ”
On 4 October, 2020, a 17-year-old domestic worker belonging to the Nishad community was found dead in her employer Drupadi Bansal’s house in Model Town, Delhi. Her foster-family, who has been taking care of her ever since her mother’s death many years ago, believe that she was raped and murdered, but the employer’s family and the police claim it was a suicide. The employer’s family consists of Bansals and Mittals, both belonging to powerful Bania or mercantile castes. The Nishad community is a marginalized caste, classified as OBC in Delhi.
A few hours before her body was discovered, the victim had called her foster mother to say that Bansal was forcing her to sleep in the driver’s room even though she didn’t want to do so, and she asked her foster mother to come and take her because she didn’t like it there. Her foster mother, Kusum, had arranged for her to work at the Bansal house around a week before this day. Kusum and Bansal had agreed that her daughter would sleep in the dining room, which had a CCTV camera.
Kusum could not go to pick her up immediately as she had to attend to some work. When she came back home, she found that Drupadi Bansal’s daughter Renu Mittal had called her. When she called back, Mittal told Kusum that she was going to pick her up and take her to the house because her daughter had locked herself in a room and was not coming out. On the way, Mittal kept Kusum from calling her daughter saying that they were going to reach soon anyway. As they reached the house, however, Kusum saw dozens of policemen there, and Mittal asked her to meet her daughter and went upstairs to her mother’s house. Bansal’s son was also at the house. The policemen were sipping on cold drinks.
Kusum went inside to find her daughter’s body hanging from the ceiling in the driver’s room. Before she was dragged away by the policemen, she noticed that the cloth with which she was hanging did not belong to her, and there were boils and bruises on her hands, back, and armpits.
What followed was harassment, abuse, intimidation, and assault, with the police making every attempt to keep the body of the victim from the family. The family was made to give multiple statements even though allegedly no statement was ever taken from the Bansals.
Frustrated with the inaction, being kept from the body and not being told any of the facts of the case, Kusum’s family and neighbours broke a few planter pots in front of the Bansal house to demand answers from the family.
In retaliation, the police detained 12 people from amongst the family and their neighbours. In custody, the men and women were allegedly assaulted and abused. The police pulled the women by their hair, beating them, and hurling insults. Many police officers, in an inebriated state, forced the men to jump, hitting them every time they stopped jumping. The police released them only after warning them to not demand an FIR and threatened to file false cases against them under the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 if they dared to try to file one. The police threatened to get all of them evicted, and even beat up the victim’s 12-year-old cousin, threatening to declare the victim’s body as unclaimed and burn it.
The post-mortem was only conducted 4 days after the incident and on 8 October, the police allegedly forcefully burnt the body of the victim. The family was also not allowed to access the full post mortem report which came out after the body was burnt. Even after the post-mortem report came out, the police refused to file an FIR.
On October 16, Kusum’s family and neighbours, along with students from the nearby Delhi University staged a protest outside the Model Town station. The protestors, including a reporter from the Caravan, were forcefully detained and allegedly abused in custody. Many of the detained protestors and people who came out in support of Kusum were from her neighbourhood Gurmandi, a predominantly Dalit locality, where many work as domestic workers.
The police has not yet registered an FIR, and has declared it a case of suicide without any evidence or investigation.
In order to help the upper castes escape accountability for violence against a Bahujan woman, the Delhi police has used the same tactics of violence, intimidation, humiliation, and harassment against the victim’s family that the state has historically used against Dalit-Bahujan families when they seek justice, most recently against the Valmiki family in Hathras. Violence from upper-castes is erased and the blame is instead placed on the victim, with official records framing rape and murder as suicide and discrediting the victim’s testimony or their communication with their family as unreliable. The family is humiliated and dismissed by police officials, and if they dare to protest in any way, they are further violently punished. All of these forms of abuse of power serve to erase caste-based sexual violence, enable upper-caste perpetrators to escape accountability, and justify sexual violence through the caste position of the victim.
Sources:
https://caravanmagazine.in/labour/model-town-nishad-mother-teenager-suspicious-death-police-repression
https://english.madhyamam.com/india/hathras-model-rape-murder-and-cremation-in-delhis-gurmandi-586470
https://caravanmagazine.in/law-and-order/the-caravan-staffer-assaulted-by-delhi-police-acp-inside-model-town-station
https://thewire.in/women/model-town-delhi-gonda-rape-domestic-help
