The Second Assault

In 2020, 10 Dalit women were raped daily in India. The Hathras victim was among them. The way her case was remade into fiction proves twisted headlines can rewrite rapes and erase women

- Fozia Yasin

THE tulsi plant is still alive.

Every morning in Bool Garhi village, a grandmother waters it with the same deliberate care she brings to prayer. Her granddaughter planted it. She was the one who loved growing things and who dreamed of the city. She was also the one who was burned by the police at 2:30 am five years ago. The plant is the only grief the grandmother permits herself in public. Everything else, the loss, the litigation, the security escorts and the men with cameras, has been absorbed into survival.

At the lane's entrance, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel sit on plastic chairs beneath a tin shade. They have been there for five years. When the father tends fields somewhere nearby, where his daughter was found, two uniformed men accompany him.

When the brother goes to court, armed men follow.

“Hum apne hi ghar mein qaidi ki tarah reh rahe hain (We live like prisoners in our own home),” he says quietly.

Inside, a photograph hangs on the wall. The mother looks at it for a long time. “We are still waiting for justice,” she finally says.

The brother's phone contains a curated archive of media coverage of the case from October 2020. He scrolls through it with disbelief. “They turned her life into a story of doubt,” he says. “But it is not true. Why did they say such things?”

She was 19.

On September 14, 2020, she was dragged by her dupatta into a field near Bool Garhi, Hathras, and gang-raped by four men from the dominant Thakur community. She suffered a fractured spine. She gave a dying declaration before a magistrate on September 22, naming all four accused. She died on September 29. At 2:30 am on September 30, police cremated her body without her family’s presence. They claimed consent. The family denies this.

The numbers tell their own story.