Enemy In The Shadows

With a new case registered every hour, india has become a hotbed of stalking incidents. It’s time the authorities took a hard look at the law and its implementation t0 enhance deterrence on the ground

- Amitabh Srivastava

All Sanjeev Singh remembers was a ball of fire running towards him at 4 am on August 23. Only when he heard it scream "Bacha lo (save me), Papa" did he realise that it was his 16-year-old daughter Ankita, a student of Class 12 at Girls High School, Jaruadih, in Jharkhand's Dumka district. They rushed her first to the nearest hospital and later shifted her to Ranchi, but Ankita succumbed to her injuries after struggling for four days.

Ankita was a victim of stalking, which has become a growing menace in India. Her stalker, a 23-year-old named Shahrukh Hussain, had been pursuing her for close to three months. He called her again at 8 pm on August 22, this time to deliver a final threat"Be my girlfriend or I will kill you." The bright student, who had high academic hopes, had no time for the stalker. But Shahrukh, like many others of his ilk, was unwilling to take no for an answer.

Ankita told her father, a grocery shop worker, about Shahrukh's threat the moment he returned home at about 10 pm. Sanjeev promised to speak to Shahrukh's family the next day. Tragically, that would prove too late.

Ankita had been sleeping by a window in her room, when she awoke with a start to find Shahrukh and his accomplice Nayeem drenching her with petrol. They then lit a matchstick and threw it at her.

When they arrested Shahrukh the next day, he seemed unrepentant, even grinning while being put in handcuffs. In his mind, he had done nothing wrong. And he certainly wasn't the first for whom 'love' had turned into an obsession, to the point of annihilating the object of his affection if he couldn't attain it. Stalking was first criminalised in India in 2013. Since then, the number of cases recorded by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has nearly doubled, from 4,689 in 2014 to 9,285 in 2021. That's 25 cases a day, or one every hour.