“Gujjars Ram Sukh, Ram Karan, Gyarsa, Badri & Brahmin Shravan Sharma gangraped Bhanwari Devi and then led a casteist victim-blaming campaign forcing the entire village to socially boycott and exclude them.
Dhaule baal wali mahila se kaun balatkar karega? (Who would rape a grey-haired woman?)
- Bhairon Singh Shekhawat (then Chief Minister of Rajasthan) reportedly victim-blamed Bhanwari Devi after she was raped in Rajasthan, 1992.
Rajasthan Sessions Court Judge Jagpal Singh acquitted Bhanwari Devi’s rapists saying she’s lying because upper-caste men would not risk being polluted by raping a Dalit woman.
He blamed Bhanwari Devi’s husband asking how he could have “stood by” and “watched” his wife being raped, even though he had been brutally beaten by the rapists.
The court suggested that the lehenga produced as (tampered) evidence in Bhanwari Devi’s case was ‘too short’ to be hers, and that she was an adultress because of the unmatched semen sample found on it.
BJP MLA Kanhaiya Lal Meena attended a rally in support of the rapists, and denounced Bhanwari Devi as a ‘prostitute’ in 1996. The rally called for her to be hanged and burnt alive. She was attacked soon after.
Various unnamed villagers subjected Bhanwari Devi and her family to casteist harassment, and her son’s college peers called him names such as “kumhaari raand ka beta”, forcing him to leave his college.
”
On September 22, 1992, Bhanwari Devi, a Bahujan woman who used to work as a sathin in Bhateri, Rajasthan, was gangraped by five men from the Gurjar caste as her husband was beaten up. Bhanwari Devi belonged to the Kumhar caste which is traditionally associated with pottery, and had been working as a sathin since 1985. Sathins are grassroots workers employed as part of the Women Development Project, Rajasthan. Bhanwari Devi had been selected and trained as a sathin in 1985.
The Prajapat Kumhar caste, which Bhanwari Devi belonged to, is classified as an OBC in the state. She has also been reported to be a Dalit woman in many sources including the Court judgement. This can be attributed to differences between administrative and social categorizations or confusions in reportage. However, it is clear that she belonged to a far less powerful caste than her perpetrators, who were from the Gurjar caste. The Gurjar caste too is classified as OBC. However, the Kumhars are a minority compared to the Gurjars who were the majority dominant caste and held economic and political power, in the Bassi block especially. Badri, one of the perpetrators, was a prominent local politician, and the local MP Rajesh Pilot, was also a Gurjar and a cabinet minister at the time.
When she began work on a campaign to stop child marriage in 1992, she found herself alienated by the people of the village who got increasingly hostile towards her. During that time, the state government had decided to observe the fortnight preceding the Akha Teej festival as a anti-child marriage fortnight. The District Collector had asked the sathins to prepare a list of villages in the district where child marriage was rampant, and the Sub-Divisional Officer (SDO) and Deputy Superintendent of the Police (DySP) began to make rounds of these villages. Bhanwari Devi was seen by the villagers as the cause for this police intervention in her village.
On the day of Akha Teej, she tried to stop the marriage of a one-year-old girl in Ram Karan Gurjar’s family. Bhanwari Devi knew that she would face retaliation for this, and had told the officials that the Gurjars would come after her. But she was asked to stop the marriage regardless of this danger, and she was faced with a hostile response from the family. The MLA of the area also opposed her strongly. The policeman who was sent to stop the wedding, ate wedding sweets and left. Although the Gurjars bribed the police and were able to conduct the wedding the next morning, the entire incident was seen as Bhanwari Devi insulting the honour of the Gurjar caste and their village.
After this incident, Bhanwari Devi and her husband were socially boycotted by the village- their fields were destroyed and their fodder stolen. They were denied access to water and milk. Those who did not boycott her were threatened by the Gurjars and forced to withdraw support. This hostility finally culminated on September 22, 1992, when Bhanwari Devi and her husband were working on their fields. Her husband, Mohan Lal Prajapat was allegedly attacked by brothers Ram Sukh Gujjar, Ram Karan Gujjar, and Gyarsa Gujjar, their uncle Badri Gujjar, and a Brahmin man, Shravan Sharma. Hearing his screams, Bhanwari rushed to the spot. According to reports, Shravan Sharma and Ram Karan Gujjar held Mohan down, Ram Sukh Gujjar held Bhanwari Devi down, and Gyarsa Gujjar and Badri Gujjar raped her.
As a woman from an oppressed caste speaking publicly about sexual violence and decidedly seeking legal recourse, Bhanwari Devi was faced by victim blame from all parts of society for years to come.
The process of reporting the violence was marked by humiliation and dismissal. The police, refused to file an FIR, arguing with her for hours, humiliating her by asking whether “she even knew what rape was”. They did not conduct a medical examination until 52 hours after the incident, and even then, did not record all her injuries properly. In the aftermath of the trauma of rape, she was made to travel all the way to Rajasthan to have her medical examination taken. When she came back to Bhateri, the police made her deposit the lehenga she was wearing as evidence, forcing her to wear her husband’s blood stained turban as clothing while she walked back to her home. During this time, the local MLA also made a statement at the state legislature saying that Bhanwari Devi was lying.
The villagers, instead of holding the rapists accountable, blamed Bhanwari Devi for making a “private” matter of the village public and hence insulting the village’s honour.
The then Chief Minister of Rajasthan made a public statement saying “Dhaule baal wali mahila se kaun balatkar karega?” (Who would rape a grey-haired woman?) and refused to believe her allegations.
The accused were arrested more than a year after the incident, after the case was shifted to the jurisdiction of the CBI. During the course of the investigation, Bhanwari Devi was made to recount her statement multiple times, forcing her to relive the trauma of the violence again and again. Although Justice NM Tibrewal, the High Court judge who was first hearing the case had refused a plea for bail for the accused, saying he believed Bhanwari Devi’s testimony, the judges on the case were inexplicably changed five times. During the trial, she was humiliated and intimidated, being forced to recall the details of the violence in the presence of 17 men, including the perpetrators. The details were then spread in the village, where she faced further victim blame.
All five accused were acquitted by a Sessions Court in 1995, in a judgement that ignored her testimony and her husband’s witness, instead resorting to victim blame. The judgement blamed Bhanwari Devi for the violence inflicted on her by calling into question her purity and her morality.
The judgement blamed her husband, saying “it is not possible in Indian culture that a man who has taken a vow to protect his wife, in front of the Holy fire, just stands and watches his wife being raped, when only two men, almost twice his age,were holding him.”
It discredited her testimony, saying “there are three brothers and an uncle among the accused, and so, it is preposterous to believe that an uncle and his nephew would commit rape together”.
It said, “Among the accused is a Brahmin while the rest are Gurjars. Since gangs in rural areas are almost never multi caste, the charge that members of two different castes acted together is highly improbable”.
It blamed her saying, “Bhanwari Devi neither immediately informed anyone (for instance, her in-laws) about the rape nor did she immediately file an FIR for the same”.
It further discredited her and blamed her saying, “since Bhanwari Devi is a Dalit woman and all the accused men belong to upper-castes, it is ludicrous to believe that the latter would ignore the caste hierarchy and put themselves at a risk of being polluted by coming in contact with the former, let alone rape her”.
The judgement also dismissed her entire testimony saying, “the Indian rural society could not have sunk so low that a villager would lose all his senses of age and caste and pounce upon a woman like a wolf”.
The lehenga produced as evidence which was not the same one she had deposited, was pronounced to be too short to belong to Bhanwari Devi, and the semen collected from it was pronounced to not match the accused. The court blamed her character by suggesting that Bhanwari Devi was an adultress.
The acquittal and subsequent protests led to an even more hostile retaliation against her. People refused to buy clay vessels from her family, and they were denied access to all services and resources, not allowed to fetch water from the village. Their kids were bullied in school and they were excluded from all events and festivities. Her family asked her to make peace with her assaulters after the acquittal, but when she refused, they severed ties with her.
After the acquittal, people began to shame her and intimidate her in order to stop her from filing an appeal. In 1996, the BJP supported a rally organized by the five accused. The accused sat garlanded on a stage, as speakers accused Bhanwari Devi of lying, and insulted everyone on her side. The organizers called for Bhanwari Devi to be hanged and burnt alive. A BJP MLA Kanhaya Lal Meena denounced her as a prostitute. Incited by this rally, a number of villagers attacked her once again and beat her. After the release of the film Bawandar based on her story in 1999, her family faced further humiliation and blame. Her son, who was a college student, was forced to leave the college where he was studying when he was called “kumhari raand ka beta” (potter whore’s son).
Later, both her sons and their wives severed ties with her as well, blaming her for the shame they had to face. Her in-laws and her brother cut ties with her after she refused to accept the monetary compensation offered by the rapists to shut down the legal case.
Bhanwari Devi awaits justice to this day. As recently as 2018, she was still facing the victim blame for seeking justice against her perpetrators, and was refused water from the village hand pump. Even today, she has to travel to a nearby village to grind her grains. The case is still in appeal, and two of the perpetrators have died.
References:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-39265653
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4406813?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
https://www.news18.com/news/india/the-story-of-bhanwari-devi-indias-metoo-woman-1682995.html
https://cjp.org.in/as-metoo-mounts-bhanwari-devis-struggle-must-not-be-forgotten/
https://aud.ac.in/uploads/1/admission/admissions2019/M%20Phil%20Reading%202-compressed.pdf
http://ssr-net.com/issues/Vol_4_No_1_June_2018/3.pdf
https://feminisminindia.com/2017/03/03/bhanwari-devi-essay/
