I still remember the first time I went to Police station then I was studying 8th standard. On that day I was beaten not by police but by my father, being an Indian and especially women it is sin to visit a police station even its for complaining about your friends stolen Bicycle for which I had visited the Khakis. The current system of police in effect in the sub continent is inherited from our ex bosses British rulers who used this force to rule us. Time has change but the system is still same.
A common Indian thinks a thousand times before visiting a police station moreover he fears even to talk with the Khaki. The foremost reason for these issue is the Khaki wardi (uniform), red bricks patterned police stations and principally the mind set. The police men in India most of them treat the citizens as slaves I mean the language used is harsh and they always be strict. Thus a larger majority of the country fails to complaint on falsehood around them or on them. Police men are keen on maintaining records thus if the odd citizen visits them they (police) will give you thousand reason to settle a case without F.I.R (First Information report).
Rape in police custody is very common in India, and in such cases, inevitably there is a huge cover-up and rarely at all has any police or army official ever been brought to trial in such cases. The case of gang rape and murder of a young Manipuri woman Thangjam Manorama by Indian army personnel in 2004 is one instance. Few years, there was the case of rape and murder of two Kashmiri women - Asiya and Nilofar - in Shopian, Kashmir, in which the Central Bureau of Investigation (India's highest government investigative agency) helped in a shameful cover up, coming up with a report that claimed the two women ‘drowned' in a stream six inches deep. The CBI's forensic team reported, laughably, that rape had not occurred since the body of one of the women (a teenager), exhumed after four months, showed that "the hymen was intact"! In the Shopian case, doctors and lawyers who had testified to evidence of rape and murder have been prosecuted while the accused paramilitary personnel (as well as the police personnel who assisted in destroying evidence) go free.
We could also recall the case was of gang rape of a rural women's health worker Bhanwari Bai in 1995, where a judge ruled that she could not have been raped since she was of a ‘lower caste' than the four ‘upper caste' men accused of raping her. The judge's offensive claim was that upper caste men would not deign to touch a lower caste woman, whereas rape is all too often deployed as a weapon to humiliate and suppress the oppressed castes in India. Another terrible recent rape case was the Khairlanji case where a dalit (oppressed caste) woman and her daughter were very brutally gang raped in full view of a village and then publicly massacred along with her two sons. There was a conviction in this case, (after all the usual delays and refusals by police to file a case) but the verdict was criticised by many activists because it convicted only for rape and refused to invoke India's law against caste discrimination/atrocities.
Women from India's North Eastern states hold placards during a peaceful protest against the rape of a girl from Mizoram, in New Delhi on November 29, 2010.
In India's forest areas, tribal women who have with great courage filed cases of rape against security personnel, have found that their rapists not only roam free, they freely abduct and threaten these women and their families that if the cases are pursued, they might be arrested or even killed after being branded as ‘extremists' and ‘insurgents.'
And most recently a girl in her teenage just 14-year-old Sonam Ali's body was tied to a tree in Police station in the village of Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh. The first opost mortem reported that they are not evidence of murder or rape and it's a cleare case of suicide, After a much havoc by the illiterate parents Intezam and Tarranum Ali, a mere coverage by media. Forced the ruling Mayawathi Government intervened and a second autopsy was ordered and conducted. It confirmed murder, though not rape.
Four cops have been arrested on charges of tampering with evidence, the Lakhimpur Kheri Superintendent of Police, DK Rai, has been transferred. Three doctors who conducted the first autopsy have been suspended.
And the opposition is up in arms. "In UP thousands of women face rape, several have been found dead, but still our CM has not spoken on the law and order situation even once," said the Congress' Rita Joshi. Samajwadi Party General Secretary Azam Khan said demanded a CBI probe. "This is a cover-up by the police, the case is botched up", he said. And BJP is demanding for a third autopsy as it fears that this is case of rape and murder.
It is too pathetic and funnier at the same time because a woman is raped every 18 hours in the capital - double the number recorded in Mumbai - and molested every 14 hours. The capitals were Sheila (congress) is ruling has become rape capital. Lest we forget how women's were raped in BJP ruled Gujarat in 2001.
Thus the basic problem is the attitude and mindset of the average human being every case is not like Jessica Lal murder. A total reformation in India police system is need at par with the awareness of legal rights among the common man.
In India, rape victims routinely face police harassment and refusal to file rape charges. Then, if at all charges are filed, judicial insensitivity, delayed trials, and so on. And in the case like Sonam Ali police easily fabricate the evidence and get away just like that.
- Misba Fathima
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