Unnao case: For some 'ugly' netas, crime brings poll rewards

A teenage girl is allegedly raped by a lawmaker to settle scores with her family. When the family decides to seek justice, first, the father dies mysteriously in custody. An eyewitness to the case then dies under suspicious conditions. An uncle gets thrown into jail with a 10-year sentence. And ultimately, the survivor meets with an “accident”, when the car she is in is hit by a truck driving on the wrong side of the road. She loses two aunts, and is herself on the edge of life. Too many coincidences, or a very-sinister, and outright brazen methodology to silence inconvenient voices?

Look back at the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, where the crude depiction of systemic evil was brought to life by villainous characters who laughed loudly, used sex as punishment and used the administration with impunity to settle personal scores and eliminate people who stood in their way.

Fiction is supposed to be an exaggeration of life. But even fiction pales when compared with stories from the lives of India's ugly politicians. People who have been elected as lawmakers, but who not only consider themselves above the law, but also use the legal and administrative machinery with brazenness to settle personal scores.

The plight of the Unnao rape survivor, whose biggest crime, it appears, was to seek justice, is not an isolated one. And BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar is not the first legislator to misuse his proximity to power. Sixteen years ago, a young poet, Madhumita Shukla, was shot by the henchmen of another legislator from east Uttar Pradesh, Amarmani Tripathi, then with the Samajwadi Party.

Shukla was seven months pregnant with his child and was becoming an inconvenience he was best rid of. Investigators who hit on the truth soon had their case scuttled as Amarmani used his political clout. It was only after the IAS and IPS lobbies countered with their own pressure that Amarmani and his wife were arrested.

Jail life, however, turned out to be merely a change of address, with Amarmani actually going on to win an Assembly election as an independent in 2007, with a neat margin of 20,000 votes. The couple were convicted with a life sentence that very year, but Amarmani continues to run his empire from jail, and often enough from outside it, as he gets out for medical treatment.

Amarmani's son, Aman Mani, turned out to be a chip off the old block. He is accused of having murdered his wife, Sara Singh (27), in 2015. Aman Mani was packed off to jail in 2016, yet, he managed to win the 2017 Assembly elections from behind bars. Soon after becoming a lawmaker, Aman Mani walked out of prison on bail. Last year, he was charge-sheeted. The charge-sheet accuses him of being “guilty of killing his wife Sara by strangulation with a premeditated plan of getting rid of her and portraying a fake road accident as the cause of her death”. The charges have in no way impeded his career as a lawmaker.

In fact, in 2012, when Aman Mani had no charges against him, he actually lost an election. Political analyst Milan Vaishnav, in his book, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, observes that a criminal reputation actually helps at the hustings.

Studying election results between 2004 and 2013, the author calculated that if the probability of winning an election is seven per cent for a candidate with an unblemished reputation, it increases to 19 per cent with at least one case against the candidate and if the case is a serious one, the probability of a win increases to 25 per cent. “Sexual violence is an integral part of being in the power structure,” notes Kavita Srivastava of the People's Union for Civil Liberties.

In 2011, there was the unfortunate murder of an assistant nurse from Rajasthan, Bhanwari Devi, who paid with her life for threatening to expose her paramour, former cabinet minister of Rajasthan Mahipal Maderna. Maderna joined hands another paramour of Devi, Congress MLA Malkhan Singh Bishnoi (who also fathered a daughter with her) and killed her. They'd have escaped, except that tapes leaked out. Both are in jail. The trial is still on.

There are two ways of looking at India, says Annie Raja, general secretary, National Federation of Indian Women. “On the one hand, we talk about India becoming a multi-trillion economy. On the other, feudal and patriarchal mindsets are getting more pronounced, the murderous mentality has come to the fore,” Raja argued.

Raja said that across political parties, there is a tendency to protect a politician who is accused of a crime, more so if it is a crime against a woman. “Take the case of Azam Khan. Akhilesh Yadav did not remove him from the party when he made those misogynist statements. Even under pressure to apologise, Khan gave a wishy-washy statement saying if his statement had caused hurt, he was sorry. When there is protection from the top leadership, the audacity of such men increases.”

Former chair of the National Commission for Women (NCW) Lalitha Kumaramangalam noted that the tragic truth was that “girls are raped by men in power everyday, whether the power is that of a policeman, a politician or an upper caste man. For every one case that hits headlines, several others remain unreported”.

She notes that the naming-and-shaming approach doesn't work in many areas, where such crimes may actually enhance the person's reputation. “Sengar first needs to be removed from the area of his influence, the trial should have been shifted elsewhere. Only the fear of a fast trial and swift punishment could prove some deterrent to such crimes,'' she believes. (On August 1, the Supreme Court transferred all five cases related to the Unnao rape from Uttar Pradesh to Delhi).

NCW chief Rekha Sharma, however, has a measured response. “I cannot speculate whether it was an accident or an act of crime; let the police give us a statement first,'' she says. Sharma, however, adds that there was police laxity in Unnao (where the accused is a legislator). “According to her mother, they anticipated attacks and had gone to the police several times, but were unheeded,” Sharma said.

Women's organisations blame the Uttar Pradesh government for being in cahoots with the accused MLA in the Unnao rape case since the beginning. “This girl actually left no stone unturned in informing authorities about threats. Yet, she remained unprotected,” says Srivastava. “The state government's role in the conspiracy cannot be ruled out,” she alleges.

The NCW constituted a two-member fact-finding team this week and had sought that the girl's uncle, lodged in jail, be released on parole to perform the last rites of the deceased. The commission, however, has been rather tepid in its response to the Unnao incident, and only made the demand for a “free, fair and speedy investigation”, and asked the director-general of police to keep it updated with the progress.