Courage and conviction

Varnika Kundu says she is plain exhausted. “I don’t think I have slept for more than a couple of hours every night since Saturday [August 5]. Even when I sleep for a few hours, I wake up feeling like I haven’t slept a wink. That’s how tiring it has been,” she tells me, as we settle down to chat at her house at Sector-6 in Panchkula in Haryana. “Also, I am the quiet kind; I don’t think I have ever talked so much in my life!” she laughs.

It is the evening of August 7, and the house in a tony residential area is teeming with reporters and camerapersons. Her Facebook post on August 5, narrating her ordeal past midnight on Friday night (August 4), had gone viral. Every few minutes, either the doorbell or her cellphone rings with a fresh request for an interview. Each request is handled deftly by her younger sister Satvika, a Delhi-based journalist who has been in town since August 6. Her father, Virender Kundu, is additional chief secretary in the Haryana tourism department.

A disc jockey, Varnika, 29, is still to get over how the story of her being stalked by two men has gone viral on social media. “I can’t believe I have been trending over Game of Thrones! Girls are going out at midnight, taking selfies and posting under the hashtag #AintNoCinderella,” she says.

Varnika was driving home past midnight when she was stalked. “I love driving, and often step out for a drive by myself,” she says. That night, however, two men in a white SUV chased her relentlessly through the streets of Chandigarh. Twice during the chase, one of them stepped out of the car to walk towards her. The second time round, the man tried to open the door of her car, sending shivers down her spine.

“My mother would always tell me to lock the car doors, and thankfully, I had done so that night, too. I wouldn’t have been alive otherwise,” she says. The police, whom Varnika had called during the chase, arrived just in time to catch the men “red-handed”. One of them turned out to be Vikas Barala, son of Subhash Barala, BJP president in Haryana.

“This was not stalking; this was terrorising,” says Varnika. “I have never had a panic attack, so I don’t know what it feels like. But I can still feel the spasm in my lower back, the intensity of fear that I felt that night when I realised that these guys were not backing off. My hands were shaking when I called 100; it’s only three digits, but it seemed so hard.”

As someone who often works through the night, Varnika says the incident is unprecedented. “I have always been cautious, always looking over my shoulder, even noting down a car number if I felt something was suspicious,” she says. “In fact, all four of us [the Kundu family] are black belts in martial arts.”

Virender recalls how, when he got a distress call from his daughter, he could only feel grateful that she was alive. “Anything could have happened that night. That she is fine is God’s gift to us,” he says.

Virender says he had often asked himself: Had he brought up his daughters the right way? Had they been given too much freedom to make their choices? “Now, of course, I feel I did the right thing. Varnika could get out of the situation safely only because she had been empowered to take decisions independently,” he says.

The father warned his daughter of the fight that lay ahead if she decided to register a police complaint. “I told her that the matter would go to court, that she would have to face humiliation during testimony, and that the trial could take months, even years. But Varnika was determined to take action,” he says.

In the dock: Vikas Barala.

At the police station, Virender got a call from “someone known to him”, who revealed that one of the accused was Subhash Barala’s son. “I told him that it didn’t matter who he was, and that we were not going to back down,” he says. The filing of the complaint took about four hours, and the police patiently heard both the parties out, says Varnika.

Both Varnika and her father followed it up with two Facebook posts detailing the incident. The posts went viral in a few hours, and the trolls sprang up. In an attempt to malign Varnika, old pictures of her with her friends were posted on Facebook and Twitter, and insinuations were made about Vikas Barala and her having known each other earlier.

Ramveer Bhatti, deputy president of the BJP in Haryana, said on television that it was the girl’s fault that she was out so late at night. I ask Varnika about it, and she says each time she answers that question, her “blood starts to boil”. “No one questions a boy about why he was late at night. My only fault was that I was at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and bumped into the wrong guys,” she says.

The accused are law graduates. They first claimed that it was a misunderstanding. When she persisted with her complaint, they told her, “Sorry, galti ho gayi behenji (We made a mistake, sister).”

The police had initially said that there was no CCTV footage of the incident. On August 8, however, they made a U-turn saying the footage had been found, and that it showed Varnika’s black sedan being followed by a white Tata Safari. The accused were booked under Section 354D (stalking) and 185 of the Motor Vehicles Act (driving by a drunken person or by a person under the influence of drugs). They were released on bail.

With pressure mounting on the accused and their families, they were forced to back off a bit. On August 8, Subhash Barala broke his silence on the matter, and told journalists that Varnika was just like his “daughter”. He said there would be no pressure on the investigation, and that the law would take its own course. The police said if stronger sections needed to be invoked, they would do so.

With Barala’s statement, the recovery of the CCTV footage, and the arrest of the accused on August 9—the police are pressing fresh charges of abduction against them—the tide has turned in Varnika’s favour.

“This is a test case for the system,” says Virender. “There’s nothing simpler than this case; there is no hidden motive, no grey area. If even then we can’t get justice, then the system has failed us.”