WHAT WENT
WRONG – 4
My name is Geeta, aged 27 years and a mother of two, a son and a daughter. I originally
come from a village in western U.P. I married Kamal ten years ago and we shifted to
Delhi. People move to the cities in order to make it big; we left everything back home
in order to survive. Survival at the cost of losing everything except my children is
what I finally got.
Born to a small farmer family, I had a brother younger to me. My mother used to assist
my father and attend to household work. We were leading a peaceful life. I
went to school regularly and so did my brother. I used to consider Lakshmi, my elder
cousin as my role model. She had completed her Post graduation despite all odds.
Education to such high standards was unheard of in our society for girls. She got short-listed
as a Teacher in a Govt. School. However, at the same time her marriage was solemnized in
a respectable family. Her in-laws did not allow her to take up the job. They
wanted her to be confined to the kitchen. This had disastrous results on my life
too. I was not allowed to continue my education beyond the ninth grade. My parents
told me it was a waste for girls to be educated. This was the first misery in my
life.
One day, at the tender age of eight, my brother went to play, never to return. Life came
to a standstill. We tried to look for him wherever we could, but in vain. The loss
was too much for us to handle and the shock claimed my father's life. Whatever was left
of the family was shattered.
Time moved ahead and I got married in a well to do family, which were actually descendants of
wealthy landlords. The family consisted of my mother in law who was a widow, my husband
and myself. We were the owners of 60 bighas of prime agricultural land.
Everything seemed like a fairy tale till realities were exposed on my face. There was a
long-standing enmity in the family over the family land. Since ours was a nuclear
family, we had no support. My husband was the only child of my in-laws and a docile
person. He had a running business of Tractor repairs. He never used to retaliate
to the provocations of his distant relatives who all along had an eye on our share of the
property and had in fact, occupied quite a large portion of it already.
These provocations soon converted into threats, mild ones at first, and soon turned
violent. They used to bully us, harass us and humiliate us in public.
We wanted to stay away from such problems and decided to leave the place in search of peace
with whatever we had in liquid assets. We shifted to Delhi. We bought ourselves a plot
of land in the suburbs and built two small rooms on it gradually. Some buffaloes
were procured and we started a Dairy business. However our cousins were not happy just
by the fact that they had the whole land to themselves, they wanted everything transferred on
paper in their favour. Since we were emotionally attached to our land we were not
willing to do so, but were too weak to offer resistance. They continued to terrorize us
and we accepted it as our destiny, not that we did not want to complain, but because we did
not know who to complain to. We were both merely literate. We had poor knowledge
of the outside world. We had no knowledge of our rights and avenues to seek them.
We only knew what lay in store for us in case we complained to anyone. Our soft
complaints to the Village Panchayats drew sympathy but no solution. Thus we had
reconciled with our fate.
My mother in-law expired shortly after we shifted to Delhi. During the course of time a
son was born to me and within the same year my daughter was born. My son had barely
completed one year when disaster struck.
One night while we were all asleep, four men, all relatives of my husband entered our house
scaling the low boundary wall. They were armed with daggers and lathis. I was
woken by the sounds of resistance being offered by my husband whose face was covered by a
pillow. When I ran to intervene, one of them threw a switched on table fan on me.
I started bleeding from my face and my hands, which had got cut due to the sudden
impact. I also received an electric shock. I fainted but soon regained
composure. I started screaming. Two of them pounced on me and tried to throttle
me. My husband was also being throttled. However, I managed to free myself and
raised an alarm. It was dark. Somehow, my voice managed to reach our neighbours
and they dashed towards our house forcing these people to flee. We were left alive.
There was a lady constable of the Home Guards Department of the police who lived in the
neighbourhood. She informed the Police Control Room on No. 100. No one came.
We applied locally prepared medications and Iodex on our bruises, which were inflicted
by the knives carried by the men. There was no Doctor or Hospital nearby and there was
no one to take us to the distant ones. Bleeding did not stop. We kept on changing
our bandages, as we could not go to any Doctor. I was not aware about the local areas
and was afraid to venture out on my own.
Wounds had not even healed, when on the third night from the day of the incident, finally
police came. They enquired about the happenings and I told them the facts. My
husband had always been a shy person and now he was badly injured. He could not speak
much. The Policemen asked us to accompany them to the Police Station. We had to
go, leaving behind my infant children with the neighbours. Despite resistance, we were
whisked away by the police.
At the Police Station, we were interrogated. To our horror, we were informed that one of
the men who had come to attack us, had been killed and the police was charging us with his
murder. A bribe of Rs. 20,000/- was sought to get us out of our miseries. I had
nothing to offer. Moreover, we were not at fault. My husbands' and my pleadings
fell on deaf ears. There was no one to come to our rescue. There was no women
police there and no women lock-up. We were detained in the general lock-up for four days
without being produced in the court. To make matters worse, I did not know what was
happening to my children, both 1-year-old son and 3 months old daughter.
The police asked us to sign on some blank papers saying that we were going to be set
free. We were produced in the court again stating that we would be set free from the
court. Since we were barely literate, we could not understand what was happening.
I came to my senses only when I had landed up in the Tihar Jail along with my husband.
I had never seen a Jail. I never imagined that there could be a women jail also.
There were so many women there. All the women there who started asking all sort of
things surrounded me. My husband was kept in a separate jail. I was still not
aware of the fate of my children.
We had no lawyer, as we did not understand the legal processes. The NGOs visiting the
Jail tried to assist me but the free legal aid made available did not help. We regularly
visited the courts for hearing but could not understand anything.
However, a month later, my mother visited me and informed me that my neighbors were looking
after my children. But the expenses kept mounting on them and something had to be
done.
There were many activities being run inside the jail, which helped inmates to learn and earn
while serving their term. I got myself enrolled in various activities and started
earning. I learnt weaving tapestries, and other vocations being taught by Navjyoti, an
NGO working in the prison. My income was not much, but was still able to support my
children outside and my husband inside the jail for his essentials. I used to work very
hard to be able to earn more. Working, earning and interacting with so many people
inside and the volunteers who visited us made me a little smart and I learnt that to get free,
we i.e. me and my husband had to have a private lawyer. But this all had drained us four
years of our life, away from our children.
Our advocate who charged Rs. 5,000/- from me managed to get us acquitted and we were
free. Upon release, we reached home but had nothing to start off our family. A
volunteer called Sister Max in the jail had helped me then and given me some money for the
household items. But the police started haunting us again. They declared my
innocent husband as a "Bad Character" of that area. Navjyoti, the NGO which
had helped me in the jail, helped me again by giving me a job as a weaving instructor at their
Jahangir Puri project. They even took up my case and sent counselors to intervene with
the local police and made them see reason. However, all this was too much for me to
handle and I decided to get rid of that house of ours and settle somewhere else. It was
sold of at a very low cost and we bought another small house on the outskirts of Delhi hoping
to be away from trouble. It was not to be.
Our enemies followed us even here and started tormenting us. However, just about nine
months ago, they came to meet us and offered all apologies for their past activities and
sought a compromise. They asked my husband to come along with them and take his share of
the land. I suspected their intentions. I even told him not to believe them.
Despite my warnings, my husband, a simple man, went away with them saying, " Doesn't
matter, a human being goes with a human being."
But they were beasts. A day later the body of my husband was found hanging on a tree. I
informed the police and named the people with whom my husband had gone away. Three of
the five got arrested while two bribed the police. They still are moving freely and come
to threaten me that they would kill my children too if I want the land.
I am living in constant fear of death. I have to leave home for fending for my
children. My aged mother and my children stay alone in my absence. My children
have now been provided admission and security in residential schools by India Vision
Foundation, another NGO under its project on rehabilitation of crime affected families.
But still my mother and me are vulnerable.
However, I am uncertain about my own future. This uncertainty may lead to my selling off
this house too. I do not know where I should go to be safe in this whole wide world.
What Went Wrong……
¨ Our personal hardships were due to illiteracy and ignorance.
It became a curse, which was preventable.
¨ The elders ought to settle property disputes during their lifetime
otherwise these cause havoc in villages. The Panchayat in the villages function in a
feudal way where the innocent is sacrificed before the mighty.
¨ The rural culture of our country still disables education of
girls. Also the kind of education imparted does not empower them to assert their needs.
¨ The police in poor and backward areas is far from giving
justice. It's mostly dishonest and conspires in inflicting atrocities on those who
cannot fight back.
¨ The legal processes are not intelligible and accessible for the poor and the
weak. They continue to be blind and insensitive. |
