Dignity denied to a dalit girl's death..

A far cry…

We have been hearing lot of hue and cry over the recent rape and murder which took place at an 'exotic' setting of India, where the victim is a foreign national and the drama is ripe with drugs, sex, police lapse, political cover-up, personal diary scrutiny, British tabloid coverage, negligent parenting, cultural paradoxes, paradise lost and on and on and on.


True, there are many concerns hankering the media and the society at large in the Scarlett story. However, does our society concern itself only to the extend it can serve its sensational instincts? Does the 'low profile' rape and brutal murder of a seven-year-old Dalit girl in Kaushambi district of Uttar Pradesh on March 16 nobody's concern just because our media simply does not have any discourse on that? The young girl is anonymous for any regular newspaper reader as the story of her rape and murder was only featured in the Indian Express and that too without even a reference to her name!


That may be because the media would never be able to get titillating pictures of this Dalit girl at exotic settings! (see Tehelka cover story on Scarlett). The inertia is not new to a society that has chosen to feel for a Jessica Lal or a Priyadarshini Mattu, conveniently overlooking the inhuman murder of Bhotmange family in Keonjhar or the everyday death that many Dalits go through as they relieve themselves of the mandate of human scavenging.


When I tried to google the details of the recent Kaushambi incident, all I got were barely a handful of pieces. First was the March 19 Indian Express report with the headline 'Dalit minor raped, body found with arm and eye missing', which surprisingly got featured on the front page. The second piece was again the same syndicated story of the Express on the website of All India Christian council. The third was a story by the Hindustan Times, which carried the story with reluctance as evident by its lack of facts. It stated that the eyes of the girl had been gauged out and arm amputated by the rapists even as the body was sent for postmortem and no concrete facts had been established about the reason of amputations. In contrast to atleast one news report or editorial or opinion piece on Scarlett case daily in newspapers, the seven-year-old anonymous girl is just not good enough for any follow-ups what so ever.


Without underrating the concerns the Scarlett killing has finally evoked, I feel extreme anguish for myself and the society that we all are part of, for walking with blinders which only allow us to see what is convenient to the eye. The brutal death of this child by two Airtel employees working in the company's tower at the Koilaha village, should evoke a few concerns. Was a rural Dalit girl an easy prey to rape? Why for whole two days the body could not be found, while it was decaying in the fields?


Angry villagers torched the tower where the minor was raped and did not allow the fire brigade and police to douse the flames. They also stoned the police party along with blocking the movement of vehicles after keeping the girl's body on the GT road. The blockade was lifted after the SP of Kaushambi KS Emanuel rushed to the spot and ordered lathicharge.


Does the grotesque sight of the dead body of a seven-year-old raped girl being put on a highway by her very own parents, an act to not just demand justice and answerability?


But also a desperate plea to our society to register her loss?


Is it also an unknown plea to register the absence of any discourse by the media on many such anonymous victims time and again?

As I write this, I am aware that the last words in the Hindustan Times report on this inhuman act, sited the statement by the SP, who said, "Today the situation is normal