We have always struggled, but never faced such darkness,” said the father of a seven-year-old girl who was gangraped and killed in the village of Bhadras in Kanpur on November 14. The girl’s liver was carved out in a horrifying ritual that was supposed to help a childless couple beget an offspring.
The girl hailed from the Kureel (or Kuril) dalit community, which is the third largest chunk of Bhadras’s population. It is a caste that has long worked in Kanpur’s leather industry and also participated in reform movements.
The girl was the fourth of five children in the family. Her parents work as agricultural labourers on the farms of upper caste landowners in the village and as seasonal workers in brick kilns. The five people named in the initial First Information Report and those added in the amended FIR (which includes charges under the National Security Act) come from the same caste and similar economic background.
On the evening of Diwali, the girl had stepped out of her house to play before the festivities began. She was allegedly lured by her neighbour Ankul with firecrackers. “We set out to look for her when it was time for the puja. A girl from the neighbourhood said she had gone with Ankul. We informed the police around 10pm and they too searched for her. But we could not find her,” said her father.
The child’s naked, mutilated body was discovered the next morning in a wooded area adjacent to the village. Her blood-soaked slippers lay at some distance.
Sanjay Kumar Agnihotri, the de facto headman of the village (the post is officially held by his wife, Suman), said the child had been split open. “It is not a sight I will ever forget. I kept thinking, it could have been my child,” he said.
Incidents such as these, though aberrations, were born out of a ‘cultural lag’, said Dipti Ranjan Sahu, professor at Lucknow University’s department of sociology. “Despite advances in science and technology and a professed belief in the rule of law, there remains a variance in our knowledge, attitudes and practices. Belief systems in the supernatural and those that are driven by faith, not logic, and primordial instincts prevail across rural and urban India. The pace at which our mindsets should have changed to keep up with technological advancements has not happened,” he said.
Such incidents are not born in isolation. For Parshuram and Sunaina Kureel, married for more than 20 years, there might have been years of pressure and ridicule about their childlessness. The desperation would have mounted after years of unsolicited advice and miracle concoctions offered by babas (holy men of dubious antecedents) bore no result. This would then have driven them to solicit help from Parshuram’s nephew Ankul (who, in turn, sought the help of his friend Beeran) after they read that eating a child’s liver would assure them a baby of their own.
“While educational status and economic background play a role in such cases, the pressure of family and peers cannot be discounted.” said Sahu. “Being childless remains a stigma in most parts of the country.”
“When any desire or ambition reaches the level of obsession, the mind justifies any act committed for the achievement of that desire,” said Krishna Dutt, former professor of clinical psychology at King George’s Medical University in Lucknow. “In this case, the couple would not have thought they were indulging in a crime. To them it was merely an act that would result in them having a child. The men who carried out the act would have thought that the child had to die anyhow, so why not rape her, too.”
In July, a 60-year-old man in Gonda was beheaded by a man who wanted to appease a deity. In 2006, a three-year-old boy was sacrificed in a village in Khurja to appease the goddess Kali. In Bhadras, the child’s dead body was found near a Kali temple.
“There is a tradition of sacrifice, but nowhere in the vedas is there a reference to human sacrifice,” said Hareeshwar Dixit, professor at the department of veda at Banaras Hindu University’s Faculty of Sanskrit Vidya Dharma Vijnan. “Sacrifice is for self-defence but not to ensure one’s well-being at the cost of others. There is mention of animal sacrifice and that takes place even in Islam. But to believe that Ma Kali, who is a goddess of welfare and security, can be appeased by killing another human is blind faith which must be checked.”
But to the unlettered parents of the girl, such reasons make little sense. “My child wanted firecrackers. I said we did not have the money for them,” said her mother. Still she took ten rupees and got something for herself. My last memory of her is an angry demand for firecrackers. If only we could have afforded that little happiness for her, we would not have been in this pit”.