SHEKHAR GUPTA - Indian Express

Different Strokes by Sucheta Dalal

December 02, 2000

If Ruchika were your daughter
Screaming, silently

First of all, a quick recap of the story. On August 12, 1990, Ruchika, just 14, went to play at the Haryana Lawn Tennis Association (HLTA) courts at Panchkula, near Chandigarh. She complained to her parents that S.P.S. Rathore, a senior police officer and president of HLTA, felt her up. After some deliberation her parents, and those of her friend’s, 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 inquiries that an FIR should be filed against Rathore.

The very next day, on September 4, 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 June 13, 1992, when the state law department woke up again and recommended that an FIR be registered against Rathore. This was the time for real action to begin.

By this time Ruchika’s brother Ashu had turned 14 and, boy, wasn’t he going to be made to pay for his sister’s ‘‘sins’’. Between September 6, 1992, and August 30, 1993, the Haryana Police, instead of moving against Rathore for molesting Ruchika, registered six FIRs against her 14-year-old 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 November 17, 2000, the CBI filed a chargesheet — CHARGESHEET, not merely an FIR — accusing Rathore of molesting Ruchika.

If the story doesn’t sicken you to the point of nausea already, if it doesn’t make you bristle with anger, indignation — and fright in case you happen to be the parent of a teenaged girl — read on. Ruchika’s father, who had been in hiding for fear of police harassment, asks how come Rathore is charged only with molestation, but not for making his little daughter commit 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 14-year-old child commanding the police force next door to Delhi. Surely, Sardar Patel wouldn’t have approved of this!

HAD she survived the trauma, had she been stronger, born with a thicker skin or was a cool, calculating, scheming so-and-so, she would have been a full-grown woman of 24. 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 felt humiliated, and paid for it. What lesson does her fate hold out for other young women in our schools and colleges, work-places, 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 impenetrable political jungle of western Bihar. This happened in an upper middle class 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’ of these chargesheets. 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 expect as your DGP a man accused of molesting a 14-year-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 the human rights bodies 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 obvious inferences.

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 highhandedness and political protectionism. It raises some very special — and interesting — 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 an entire legion of ministers resign because they had been chargesheeted in the hawala case which was like a minor traffic offence 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, policemen? Innocent until proven guilty, but step aside from authority or a position of power where you could influence the case, and damage the credibility of institutions.

The opposition politicians’ 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? Would it have been different if Rathore had been a mere SHO instead of a DGP? 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? Everyone and his uncle, in Parliament, media, among the feminist NGOs, human rights organisations would have demanded his head. Immediately.

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 one-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 14-year-old child on the tennis courts at Panchkula. Where are all the women’s organisations, civil libertarians, legal luminaries that hit the streets on the Rupan case now? Much of the initial 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 had in the Rupan case, they may not have got anybody convicted but Ruchika would probably have been alive today.

Or shall we look at this entire story differently now? Maybe even the almighty bureaucratic protests in the Rupan case were more about protecting the honour of a fellow civil servant rather than just another helpless woman? Class camaraderie more than moral indignation. And the feminists and the civil libertarians and so on? Would it be too unkind to suggest that, as in the case of the politicians, cynicism gets the better of them as well? Maybe the protest and the 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 you hated?

This argument can go on and on. But for people like Vajpayee and Advani, honourable, middle-class people with sound family values, great personal integrity, the facts are clear enough. They need to only look at a mere chronology of events. If, after that, they do not find enough reason to force Chautala to move his DGP aside, or at least dissociate from him if he refuses to listen, it could only mean that, as politicians, they are no different from the others, in the Opposition and amongst their allies. 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 cinema. And you would feel ashamed.