A girl’s family says she was coerced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term and deliver a baby born out of rape. The cops say no rape ever happened and that the baby had been born out of a cruelly-terminated elopement.
Which version is real? Which side of the story is true?
On Thursday, somewhere in the low-lit labyrinths of Ghaziabad’s chikitsalay, a 15-year-old delivers a baby amid the struggle to arrive at a truth that is currently buried underneath conflicting copies of chargesheets, magistrate statements and letters.
The parents of the girl claim their daughter had been kidnapped last year – on 4 December, 2016 – and was missing until 10 March, 2017 when she was recovered from Ludhiana in Punjab.
“She was gangraped,” says her father. “My child was lured by our neighbours Neetu, Pooja and her mother Sanju Devi and kidnapped. She was then sold off to a man called Mithun Yadav, who took her off to Ludhiana — where she was kept against her will in Mithun’s uncle’s house. The duo took turns to rape her over a period of three months.”
According to the father, she managed to call her family a couple of times from a mobile phone, evading her abductors’ eyes — something the family reported to the cops, but to no avail.
They gave us no assistance. After she was finally recovered and we attempted to file a case of kidnapping and rape against the respective perpetrators, the police flatly refused to investigate a charge of rape, claiming that she had eloped of her own free will. A medical test conducted on her right after she was recovered affirmed that she was pregnant, and when we said we would abort the baby, the cops threatened us against the same, saying that they would jail us under an anti-abortion law.
What anti-abortion law could the police possibly have threatened a minor with? For one, as the father states, his daughter was discovered to be 10-11 weeks pregnant at the time of her medical examination in March – which meant she was well within the permissible limit of 20 weeks under the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act. For another, courts have been known to grant leeway to rape survivors in previous cases — particularly where the survivor has been a minor.
A corollary to that seemed to have been asserted by the Supreme Court on 25 August this year when it stated that a minor should not be forced to knock the doors of the court to terminate a pregnancy when there was proof that she had been sexually assaulted. A precious amount of time was wasted in court proceedings whilst the girl reached the riskier brink of her pregnancy.
The Quint managed to take a look at copies of the FIR that the family filed – a six-page copy in the daughter’s hand, in Hindi – and sheafs of copies of letters the father claimed he had sent to the Prime Minister, the Chief Minister, the Women’s Commission. “No one has responded,” said the anguished father, gesticulating wildly with a cloth bag that he says he carries everywhere now. It is a bag filled with everything he will need to display at a moment’s notice.
It is on the point of the abortion, however, that there emerges a palpable moment of hesitation. Where previous news reports had quoted him as being vociferous about the denial of an abortion to his daughter – something that he expressed to The Quint as well in the initial stage of the conversation – he seemed to have changed his mind later.
I didn’t want the baby to be aborted. I am against abortion as a practice. What is the fault of the little child, yet unborn? He should have the right to live.
Did his daughter agree?
She did, he says. No one in the family, then, wanted an abortion. Why the vehement insistence then, that an abortion hadn’t been allowed?
He is worked up, also, when he talks about the other error he insists the cops have made. “They claim that she is 19. That she is not a minor and therefore went to Ludhiana on her own volition with Mithun. But she isn’t!” he asserts, reaching into his familiar paper bag to pull out a school leaving certificate. “Look,” he says, pointing to a date scrawled upon it in blue ink. “It says clearly that she was born in July 2002. Look at her photograph. Does she look a day over 15?”
The cops tell an entirely different story, however. The Quint visited the Sahibabad police station where the family had registered an FIR in March. We discovered that most of the officers the father had named have relocated to other police stations. The survivor’s father mentions a Sub-Inspector Harinder Pal Singh and an SSP Deepak Kumar who had been present at the time of his daughter’s recovery.
Singh, he mentions, along with a couple other police officers, had threatened him with physical abuse when he tried to exhort them to nab the accused. The accused, Mithun, is absconding.
“There was no case of rape,” Singh told The Quint over telephone.
After the girl was recovered, we followed Section 164 of the IPC and had her depose in front of a judicial magistrate, which she did of her own free will. She told the magistrate that she had eloped with the accused of her own volition, and had hoped to marry him, but the elopement had gone awry.
What of her father’s insistence, however, that his daughter was 15 and not 19, and therefore her case should be registered under the POCSO Act?
“She told the magistrate she was 19, not 15. The doctors treating her before her delivery also registered her age as 19. Now, we (the police) are no doctors and could be wrong, but how could her doctors arrive at a mistaken age?” Singh insists.
Singh refuted charges of there having been any threats against the family to abort the girl’s baby. “How could we have threatened them under an anti-abortion law? We have little knowledge of such matters.”
He also denied there having been any coercion on the part of the police to make the girl record a false statement.
This is why statements happen in front of an independent magistrate so that there can be no opportunity or claim thereof of cops having used force.
Post the survivor’s statement, a Final Report (FR) was filed and the case is currently closed. It is not something that the father of the girl is willing to let go and he says he will keep fighting for his daughter.
While both sides tell a different tale, perhaps the answer lies with the girl who, whether 15 or 19, whether coerced or otherwise, has delivered a baby in the labour room of MMG Hospital in Ghaziabad.
(This story will be updated with more details as they emerge.)
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