On 12 August 1990, Ruchika Girhotra, just 14, went to play at the Haryana Lawn Tennis Association (HLTA) courts at Panchkula, near Chandigarh. She complained to her father that S.P.S. Rathore, a senior police officer and president of the HLTA, felt her up. After some deliberation, he and her friend’s parents made a formal complaint to the then Haryana chief minister, Hukam Singh. He asked the then director-general of police (DGP), R.R. Singh, to investigate. Singh concluded after enquiries that an FIR should be filed against Rathore.
The very next day, on 4 September 1990, the state financial commissioner accepted the DGP’s report and asked for a case to be registered under Sections 342 and 354 of the IPC. For one and a half years nothing happened. Nothing. Until 13 June 1992, when the state law department woke up again and recommended that an FIR be registered against Rathore. This is when the real action began.
By this time Ruchika’s brother Ashu had turned fourteen and, boy, wasn’t he going to be made to pay for his sister’s ‘sins’. Between 6 September 1992 and 30 August 1993, Haryana Police, instead of moving against Rathore for molesting Ruchika, registered six FIRs against her brother for auto thefts. All cases went to court. In each, he was fully acquitted. But the harassment, the humiliation, the expense of litigation claimed their victim. Four months after the sixth FIR was filed against her brother, Ruchika, now 17, committed suicide.
In early 1994, the Haryana chief secretary again recommended action against Rathore. Again, nothing happened. Ruchika’s family went to pieces, even into hiding. In July 1997, Ruchika’s friends’ parents gathered the courage to file a PIL in the Punjab and Haryana High Court asking for a CBI probe. On 17 November 2000, the CBI filed a chargesheet—chargesheet, not merely an FIR— accusing Rathore of molesting Ruchika.
If the story doesn’t sicken you already, if it doesn’t make you bristle with anger—and fright in case you happen to be the parent of a teenager—read on. Ruchika’s father, who had been in hiding fearing police harassment, asked how it was that Rathore was charged only with molestation, but not for driving his daughter to suicide? The brother’s life, after the humiliation, the torture and the litigation at such a young age, is a mess.
And Mr Rathore? He is now the DGP of Haryana and continues to be in that job despite the chargesheet. Here, Advaniji, is a first in your long and distinguished political career—someone charged in a court with molesting a fourteen-year-old child, yet commanding the police force next door to Delhi. Surely, Sardar Patel wouldn’t have approved of this.
Had Ruchika survived the trauma, had she been stronger, born with a thicker skin, she would have been a woman of twenty-four. She would, by now, have voted in three elections, may have even raised a family of her own. But she chose to complain when she was harassed as a child, and paid for it. What lesson does her fate hold out for other young women in our schools and colleges, workplaces, playgrounds? Shut up and suffer silently if some old uncleji feels you up? Particularly if he happens to be powerful, even more so if he happens to be a cop? And mind you, this did not happen in some unreachable political jungle of western Bihar. This happened in an upper-middleclass suburb, the kind of place people like us inhabit.
Quite frankly, Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala’s reasoning for not removing or suspending Rathore is so ludicrous there is no point wasting time countering it. The CBI, he says, is famous for framing people with fictional chargesheets—he should know, he says, having been a ‘victim’.* But the point at this stage, Mr Chautala, is not whether Rathore is guilty or not. The point is, in which civilised society would you appoint as your DGP a man accused of molesting a fourteenyear-old, whose brother’s life was devastated with trumped-up cases, whose father went into hiding and who, eventually, committed suicide? Which parent, and which child, will feel safe in that state any more? What view will that state’s police sub-inspectors, station house officers take of all the reforms the courts and activists have brought about in the police’s treatment of women? As such, it is not a state known to possess the most polite policemen in the country. Now, when they see their government toss aside the National Human Rights Commission’s strong suggestions to remove the DGP—based on a series of reports in the Indian Express—or the Central Vigilance Commission’s advice to do so, they will draw the obvious conclusion.
Who is to tell Chautala any of this? The BJP, which supports his government in the state, has demanded Rathore’s removal, but he couldn’t care less. As for Rathore, it’s life as usual. The case, he says, is a frame-up: ‘I am under no moral obligation to resign.’
This isn’t merely one more case of police high-handedness and political protectionism. It raises some very serious questions. First of all, why isn’t there, in the media and Parliament, the kind of outrage that would have erupted had Rathore been a politician instead of a senior IPS officer? The Supreme Court and Narasimha Rao had made almost half his cabinet resign because they had been chargesheeted in the hawala case which was like a bicycle theft compared to child molestation. Only a fortnight ago, the BJP forced two of its own ministers from Gujarat to resign because they had been chargesheeted in a rioting case. Why should the same principle not apply to senior civil servants? Innocent until proven guilty, but step aside from authority or a position where you could influence the case.
The opposition’s lack of concern we can understand. There is special delight and gain in attacking rival politicians for their misdemeanours. Civil servants are less interesting targets. But why should we see the same relative indifference at the popular level? Why are we so much in awe of the civil servant? Because he falls in the PLU (people like us) category? Would the response of the media in general have been the same had Rathore been the home minister of Haryana rather than its DGP?
The second question is an even nastier one but more relevant in the context of Chandigarh. This case has dragged on for a decade now. Why has this not evoked a hundredth of the kind of protest that the Rupan Deol Bajaj–K.P.S. Gill case did? It is nobody’s case that one kind of sexual harassment is different, or lesser or greater, in its severity than any other. But Rupan was a senior IAS officer and more capable of defending herself against a DGP than a fourteen-year-old child on the tennis courts at Panchkula. Where are all the women’s organisations, civil libertarians, legal luminaries who hit the streets on the Rupan case? The impetus in that case had come from members of the civil service in Chandigarh, so outraged at so blatant a case of sexual harassment. Where were they for four years while the file on Rathore’s prosecution was put in deep freeze, while Ruchika’s kid brother was being tortured and buried under false cases? If they had shown even a fraction of the dogged outrage they did in the Rupan case, Ruchika would probably have been alive today.
Maybe even the almighty bureaucratic protests in the Rupan case were more about protecting the honour of a fellow IAS officer rather than just another victimised woman? Class camaraderie more than moral indignation? And the feminists and civil libertarians and so on? Would it be too unkind to suggest that, as in the case of politicians, cynicism gets the better of them as well? Maybe the protest and anger in the Gill case were not so much about gender equality or civil liberties as about the political opportunity to destroy a tough, brutal cop whose guts and methods you hated?
This argument can go on and on. But for people like Vajpayee and Advani, honourable, middleclass people with sound family values, great personal integrity, the facts are clear enough. They need to only look at the chronology of events. If, after that, they do not find enough reason to force Chautala to move his DGP aside, it could only mean that, as politicians, they are no different from the others. They could, then, go and see, along with their families, Mahesh Manjrekar’s Kurukshetra, which is all about a chief minister fighting to save his rapist son, killing his victim in the hospital, destroying her family. Bollywood is not particularly known for political understatement but when you go home and review the facts of the Panchkula story, you would wonder how fast real life is catching up with dark cinema. It will shame you.
~~Anticipating India: The Best Of National Interest -by- Shekhar Gupta
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