My Husband My Rapist

31/10/2013

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(Photos for representational purposes only)

In a sunny schoolroom, off a small dusty lane in Madanpur Khadar, a resettlement colony on the outskirts of New Delhi, a group of 10 women are talking amongst themselves. Some giggle nervously. With a reporter in their midst, they’re too shy to make anything other than small talk, until Bhagwati, a slender, self-assured woman who looks younger than her 39 years, speaks up. She gives a clear, unwavering account of a marriage that had become a living hell. “For many years, I didn’t even know what domestic violence meant. I would just take the anger, the shouting, and the beatings. He would hit me for the smallest of reasons. If there was too much salt in the food, I’d get slaps across my face.” After the beatings, came the rapes. “He would force me into bed for sex. Aisa lagta tha ki uske maarne ka maksad sirf mujhe nanga karne ka tha (It felt as if his beating was aimed at getting me naked).”

Marital rape is defined simply as non-consensual sex where the perpetrator is the victim’s spouse. What Bhagwati’s husband did may have been rape but because he is married to her, and she is not under 15 year of age, it is not a criminal offence under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). In early 2000, two-thirds of married Indian women surveyed by the United Nations Population Fund claimed to have been forced into sex by their husbands. The last National Family Health Survey of India (2005-2006) found that 40 percent of women (aged 15-49), married at least once, had experienced physical, sexual or emotional violence perpetrated by spouses. This from a sample size of 1.25 lakh women across 29 states.
The women in Madanpur Khadar, all domestic abuse victims, are gathered for a meeting with Jagori, a Delhi-based women’s rights NGO for which Bhagwati now volunteers. They laugh at the idea of their husbands asking for permission. “If they cared about consent, we wouldn’t be here,” Bhagwati says. People mostly associate violence and brutality with ‘stranger rape’. Indeed, they mostly associate rape with strangers. Despite the precipitous rise in stranger rape in Delhi to around 10 percent, the national figure still hovers around two percent, meaning that the overwhelming number of reported rapes are committed by men known to the victim. Yet, violent stranger rape is the subject of an anguished public discourse while the daily sexual violence women live with in their marriages is unacknowledged, kept hush-hush.

‘My husband said that he spent money on me, how dare I not sleep with him. But he never once kissed me. On our wedding night he had sex with me seven times. I was in so much pain I couldn’t move’
Neha, 26 | Lucknow | Separated

Talking to gender rights activists, field workers, lawyers, counsellors, and women across India, it becomes abundantly clear that sexual abuse in marriages (of which the penetrative act of marital rape is just one part) is rife across regions, classes and communities. Such abuse exists, according to Flavia Agnes, the lawyer and feminist, “in a continuum of a range of violence that takes place within the matrimonial relationship.” Violence can include excessive sexual demands, making your wife perform sex acts despite her protests, forcing her to watch and reenact porn, or verbally humiliating her during sex. But rape in India is accompanied by a culture of shame and silence, enforced and internalised by victims. Women, particularly married women, are conditioned to not talk about abuse.
Unlike with most stranger rape, the sexual violence in a marriage is meted out systematically over time, until behaviour that would be criminal outside marriage becomes acceptable. Violence that should be an aberration, a shock, becomes normal. Imagine such a life in which unrelenting fear is normal, in which you are forever uncertain what might trigger your husband’s wrath, in which saying no to sex is unthinkable. You might then empathise with and perhaps even begin to understand the sort of life Bhagwati has led. Or taste the sickening brew of fear and shame that pushed 28-year-old Anita, a market research employee from Lucknow, to attempt suicide.
Anita was married in 2005, to a man in Maurana village in Unnao district, UP. The abuse started almost immediately. Her husband forced her to be available for sex at his beck and call, day or night, sometimes both. He made her perform oral and anal sex despite her resistance. He wouldn’t even let her leave the bed to go to the bathroom. “This was not a marriage. There was no love between us,” Anita says now. “He was just not concerned with me, never bothered even to talk to me.” His utter indifference and constant demands on her body took their toll. Depressed, afraid, and full of hate for her husband and herself, Anita stopped eating and fell frequently ill. Each time the doctor would tell her husband to abstain from sex for the sake of his wife’s health, he ignored the advice. “He would deny that he that done anything wrong,” she says of her husband. “So many times I tried talking to him, I tried compromising, but he never listened.”

‘My husband raped and beat me even when I was pregnant. Three months ago, I tried to commit suicide’
Smita, 35 | New Delhi | Separated

Suicide seemed the only escape. Sadly, Anita could not even rely on support from family and friends. “I asked them to help me,” she says, “but they didn’t listen, didn’t want to understand.” When she found the courage to run away, her family forced her to attempt a compromise, to go back to her abusive husband. Relief came only when Anita got in touch with the Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives (AALI), a feminist group in Lucknow that helped her file for divorce. Her husband agreed for a divorce on mutual grounds, only after AALI lawyers warned him about cases under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 (DV Act).
Anita’s case is a typical one — the early onset of abuse; the husband who doesn’t care; families that don’t support women leaving their marriages; a culture of shame. When the Delhi gangrape caused frenzied discussion on sexual abuse in a patriarchal society, the government had an opportunity to do the right thing by married women. But the Parliamentary Standing Committee chose to exclude marital rape from the Criminal Amendment Bill 2013. Criminalising marital rape, the committee argued, would weaken traditional family values. As if the institution of marriage were built entirely on a man’s entitlement to his wife, as if she were his property. It is an inherently skewed gender equation. Sex for a married woman is a matter of submitting to her partner’s pleasure. A married woman has no autonomy, no rights over her body. It is almost like the doctrine of coverture followed in England and the United States well into the 19th century, in which a married woman’s rights were essentially signed over to her husband. Back then, British feminists argued that marriage amounted to little more than legal prostitution.

‘It feels as if he was like a lion who could come into a jungle, do whatever he wanted and disappear. No one could stop him’
Sujata, 30 | Hyderabad | Separated

Bhagwati’s husband clearly thinks the same, refusing to give her money for food and clothes for herself and her children when she began to resist his demands for sex. He was only doing what society enabled. As the lawyer Indira Jaising says, by accepting that marriage presumes consent, we have “legitimised an act of violence associated with sex”. The logic of men like Bhagwati’s husband is crude: sex is the price of food and shelter. Neha, a former school teacher from Lucknow, says her husband told her point blank that he had spent money to marry her and thus had every right to sex.
She recalled in detail her horrifying wedding night, when her husband had sex with her seven times, leaving her crying in excruciating pain and unable to move. “It could be any time of the day, anyone could be in the house, I could be menstruating, it didn’t matter to him,” she says. “He would use abusive words, kick me, make me perform oral sex. And if I refused he would hit me. If I screamed he would tell people I was mad.” Neha tried talking to her parents. Their advice was for her to adjust to her new home. Her husband drank daily and the violence escalated to the point where he began harassing her outside the school where she worked. She had to leave her job. Like Anita, Neha too talks about the lack of love and affection in her marriage. “It was rape,” she says, “not a relationship.” As of now, her complaint is being heard by their gurudwara, as her family is too scared to seek legal redress. “He’s richer and more powerful than me. Will the police listen to me, a lone woman? How will I fight him?”

‘I was so scared of my husband, and hated myself so much that I tried to kill myself ’
Anita, 28 | Unnao, UP | Divorced

This feeling of inadequacy, of utter helplessness is all too familiar to any woman who has faced or continues to face abuse. There is nowhere to turn. Not to family, for whom the stigma of a broken marriage appears to override all other concerns. Which is why, the most common advice given to women is to adjust. When Bhagwati began to attend Jagori’s meetings, and began to stand up for herself, her family was appalled. Relatives tried to talk her down from her ‘rebellion’. Please your husband, they told her. Learn to live with him, to make the peace. “When I would refuse,” she says, “they would get so angry, they would tell my husband to beat me more.”
Age, social standing, none of it seems to matter. Kameshwari, for instance, is a 60-year-old woman from a village near Aelur, Andhra Pradesh. For years she was raped and beaten by her husband who branded her an unfit, sexually unsatisfying wife. She’s finally ready to leave her 65-year-old abusive husband but her octogenarian mother won’t hear of it. She is dead against the breaking up of a marriage.
If overbearing, controlling family isn’t enough, when women do summon the courage to leave, or to complain about their husband’s abuse they also need to deal with the police. Indian police is notorious for its callousness towards sexual complaints of any nature. The women of Madanpur Khadar talk about the contempt with which the police treat married women who complain of abuse, either siding with their husbands or calling them to the police station alone and keeping them there well into the night. Neha, from Lucknow, says she went to the police a two years ago. “They shooed me away. They told me to stay at home with my husband like good women are supposed to.” Several victims of domestic abuse in Delhi said how hard it was to even get their complaint registered. When TEHELKA spoke to Suman Nalwa, the Deputy Commissioner of the Crime Against Women Cell in Delhi, she denied any knowledge of the police not registering complaints of sexual abuse. When asked why she thought women were hesitant to approach the police, she said, “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask them.”

‘I bled for days after my husband raped me, and my in-laws thought I had gotten pregnant by another man. My children would go hungry and thirsty if I would say no to my husband’
Jaya, 28 | Lucknow | Separated

The uncaring attitudes of the police, of family members, are for abused women confirmations of their worthlessness. In other words, they are a continuation of the abuse begun by their spouses. In an abusive marriage, the victim’s vulnerabilities are preyed upon. Beyond sex, many say, their husbands could barely bring themselves to acknowledge their wives’ existence. They were, they say, to their husbands less than human. To talk of rape and sexual abuse in the context of a marriage challenges the culture’s notions of how marriages should function, challenges the sanctity granted to the institution, challenges the accepted gender roles — aggressive masculinity that validates itself by asserting dominance and passive femininity that seeks to keep the peace.
Dr Harish Shetty, a Mumbai-based psychologist, points out that children internalise these codes, these so-called traditional family values. They see how their mothers rarely get angry at their fathers. It is women, he says, who bear the burden of negotiating peace, who grow up being taught to please everyone and say sorry. Their sons learn that to be a woman means to be submissive.
“When our traditions dictate that satisfying her husband sexually is a wife’s duty, then we’re fighting against a widespread and entrenched mentality,” explains Sandhya Rani Valluripalli, one of Hyderabad’s doughtiest women’s rights activists. “Women are supposed to conform to the notion of bearing and honouring their husband’s name. Where is the space for a woman to talk about or understand sexuality? To express her needs? The public will turn on a woman who does so.” There does seem to be an extreme cultural hostility to and discomfort with women’s sexuality in contemporary India. Women are not supposed to be the initiators of sex, nor are they supposed to desire it. If they do, there is something wrong with them.

‘When I stood up to my husband, my family told me to just listen to him and keep him happy’
Bhagwati, 39 | New Delhi | She and her husband have been living in the same house but different rooms for six years

“We are taught from before marriage that sex is a duty you have to perform for your husband,” says Bhagwati, “that’s why there is no question of them asking for our consent.” Most women TEHELKA spoke to for this article knew what they wanted from their marriages. They universally wanted their husbands to talk to them, to show some affection, to understand their needs. They wanted pleasure from sex, something most said they had known only rarely. “My husband never even kissed me,” says Neha. Fareeda, a volunteer at Jagori, like Bhagwati, says her work with the NGO’s support groups helped her understand that women too deserved pleasure from sex. “Jis cheez se auraton ko itna anand mil sakt hai, usko itna ganda kar diya hai (men have ruined something that could give so much pleasure to women),” she says, to loud agreement from the other women in the group. “A woman’s problems,” she adds, “start from and end in bed.” Fareeda has even managed to make her husband see the light. Sort of. He used to stop eating just to make her feel guilty on days she refused him sex. Now, she says, he is slowly coming to terms with the notion of consent.
When couples meet with Dr Shetty, one of the most important things he says he does is to get them talking to each other about their sexual needs. “Most men rarely even kiss their wives,” he says. Little things help enormously. Getting men to walk alongside their wives, for instance, rather than ahead of them. Dr Shetty advises men to hold their wives close, to kiss them unexpectedly, to try to give them joy. It’s his attempt to chip away, however slightly, at the masculine edifice.
Outside Dr Shetty’s office, though, sexual pleasure is still very much a male prerogative. Vineeta, a 32-year-old government employee from Lucknow, got married three years ago. Though the sex was mostly forced, there were rare occasions when she did feel some pleasure. But if she were to ever express that pleasure, her husband would become incensed and even suspicious. “What kind of relationship was it that I was too scared to feel pleasure in sex?” And if she were to say no to sex, he would say that another man must have just sated her – “tum kisi aur se bhari hui ho”. While riding pillion on his scooter, if her head moved in any direction away from his shoulder, he would scream at her publicly to stop looking at men on the street.
He beat her and raped her with increasingly regularity. According to Vineeta, her husband would “hit me and then ask me whether that hurt a little or a lot.” Typically, he would taunt her, tell her that she was “too dark or too old and not worthy of his love.” It was her brother who finally brought Vineeta to AALI. She has now filed a civil suit under the DV Act, but wishes there was some way her husband could face criminal charges for what he did to her.

‘My husband admitted openly that he rapes me. He said it to humiliate me. The last time we fought, he pushed a wooden toy inside me and broke my skull’
Prabha, 40 | Lucknow | Separated

As in Vineeta’s case, sexual abuse is not just immediate physical violence but systematic mental abuse and psychological coercion. Women will routinely be told that they are not good enough in bed, not beautiful enough, not good at their chores, not worth anything. Threats will be directed at children. “If a woman says no to sex, the husband can refuse to feed and clothe their children,” says Flavia Agnes. “What will she do if there is no food on the table and no money to pay the children’s school fees?” Breaking down your wife, making her completely dependent on you, is a classic tactic of abusive husbands. In India, it is a tactic that is helped by social sanction, by the veneration of the marriage bond.
Which is why, women in India don’t talk about abuse in a marriage. For every woman who has spoken up, there are countless others who have stayed mute. They are scared of a broken marriage, of what people might say, of becoming destitute. Many are dependent on their husbands for financial security. They have no place to go, no way to provide for themselves and their children. Their own families won’t take them back. Many times, women who approach activists for help end up going back to their husbands. Sruthi, for instance, a working-class Dalit woman from Bengaluru, went to the police to register a case against her in-laws for extorting money. She used this to force her husband to reduce the physical and sexual violence to which he had subjected her throughout their marriage. Within a month, she went back to him. As Dr Shetty observes, an abusive husband is better than an absent one.
In his experience, Dr Shetty says he has found that women in India do not know how to live alone. They have never learnt to. Most often, they want to preserve the sanctity of their marriage. If they do try to live by themselves, they are viewed as sex objects, accessible and always available. A woman who has left her husband becomes incredibly vulnerable. “It’s a man’s world,” says Anita, explaining why she prefers the civil remedy of the DV Act, rather than pressing criminal charges against her husband. “He may go to jail, but people will point fingers at me. They’ll twist things to make it my fault.”
This is a problem present across class boundaries. “Working class women still fight,” claims Madhu, a counsellor with Jagori, “but women in the upper middle classes clam up. For them it’s a matter of honour, social status, and wealth. It’s surprising. One would think, with their education, they would be more enlightened about women’s rights.” Renu Mishra, the Lucknow Programme Manager for AALI, told TEHELKA she had dealt with a woman in 2003, an educated upper middle class woman who had been sexually abused throughout her married life and never said a thing. She hadn’t even known it was abuse, submitting to her husband’s appetite because she didn’t want to make a fuss.

‘My husband said it’s not a big deal for a woman to be hit by her husband. He would beat me and say that only he had a right to my body. If I ever got pleasure out of sex he would get suspicious and angry with me’
Vineeta, 32 | Lucknow | Separated

Of course, this is not true of all upper middle class women, just as the example of a Dalit woman is not true for all Dalits. The Mumbai-based sexologist, Dr Mahinder Watsa, for instance, insists that the well-to-do women he meets are assertive and expressive about their rights, that they expect to be treated as equal partners. As women make more money, he argues, they are less willing to put up with a husband’s abuse. He acknowledges, though, that even in his circles, including diplomats and wealthy businessmen, he has seen and heard of wife-beating and sexual abuse.
For lawyers like Agnes, and Madhu Mehra, executive director for Partners for Law and Development, the pervasive nature of sex abuse make them wary of including marital rape within the rape laws. It would privilege the single act of penetration above all other forms of sex abuse. In Agnes’s experience, women seek protection, security and compensation, which are provided under the DV Act. She finds the Act an impressive piece of civil legislation. The provisions, and protection orders, were not there under the IPC and the DV Act includes sexual abuse (along with physical, verbal, emotional and economic abuse) among the forms of abuse perpetrated in a marriage.
This helps women who do not want to talk about sexual abuse alone, says Agnes. Especially in a system in which “even Supreme Court judges make callous and unsubstantiated comments such as S498A is a ‘terrorist law’ through which women hold their husbands to ransom.” (S498A being a criminal law pertaining to cruelty to a woman in marriage.) Lawyers, Agnes says, often have to tone down accounts of sexual abuse in order for the judge to take the petition seriously. Civil remedies provide women with the recourse and protection they need. Still, some want at least the option of being able to file criminal charges. C, a transgender man from Tamil Nadu, was raped by his husband before he came out as a trans male. It took him 18 months to be able to leave the marriage. Today, he is vocal against marital rape, and says that if it were part of the rape laws he would file case against his former husband.

‘My husband would rape me, threaten to divorce me, and then sleep in another bed, so that people would think he wasn’t having sex with me’
Radha, 25 | New Delhi | Separated

In the end, though, both genders are implicated in marital rape (to varying degrees, of course): the men who think they are entitled to a woman’s body and who raise their sons to think so; the women who help perpetuate gender imbalance — the mothers who refuse to help their daughters, the mothers-in-law who view their daughters-in-law with suspicion and hostility, who further aggravate their sons against their wives. These may appear soap opera stereotypes but in conversation with survivors of marital rape, many held up. According to Harish Sadani, a Mumbai-based activist working with Men Against Violence and Abuse (MAVA), the problem is rooted in how our culture has shaped masculinity.
He cites a 2012 UNICEF Global Report Card on Adolescents which shows that 57 percent of Indian boys and 53 percent of Indian girls, between the ages of 15 to 19, find nothing wrong in a wife being beaten if she hasn’t cooked the food well, answers back, fails to inform her husband before leaving the house, neglects the children, or refuses her husband’s demands for sex. There is also the 2011 study by the International Center for Research on Women, a Washington-based non-profit, which revealed that one in every five Indian men surveyed admitted to forcing their wives into sex. In his years working with young men, Sadani has seen how notions of machismo become inculcated from an early age. The movies they watch, the music they listen to, the power equations in their own homes, all combine to persuade them that they have “a license to sex” as young man once told Sadani.
He does not, despite this, seek easy answers by blaming pop culture alone. There is no space, he says, for boys to talk about sexuality to counter all that they see and hear. Just as women have no space to talk about their desires, men have no space to understand sex as mutual pleasure and satisfaction for both parties. Sexual violence is not just a women’s issue, it is gender issue, where each generation keeps perpetrating the same vicious cycle. Masculinity dictates that men don’t talk about issues of sex, unless they’re bragging. Alcohol is set up as a demon, causing men to rape both strangers and their wives. But alcoholic rage is only symptomatic of the aggression towards women that men grow up with. “We need to help boys evolve a gender-equitable definition of masculinity,” says Sadani. “Sadly, most feminists I’ve come across don’t want to include men in their work.”
With MAVA, Sadani runs premarital guidance workshops, where men talk about sex without immediately being labelled as abusers. Many times, this talking helps them sort out their aggression towards their partners. The sort of aggression that leads to a man forcing his wife to have sex with him so many times, and so roughly, that she bleeds for days on end, as was the case with Jaya, a domestic worker in Lucknow. The ingrained violence towards women that made her husband threaten to break her limbs off when she resisted. The suspicion with which society views women that leads her in-laws to think that Jaya’s bleeding was the result of her sleeping with another man. The violence that left Prabha, a cook from Lucknow, with horrific injuries after her husband inserted a wooden toy into her vagina and then bashed her head in. Or lead Smita, another Madanpur Khadar resident, to attempt suicide after countless rapes and beatings during which he would hit her, scratch her, tear her clothes off, even when she was pregnant. Her mother-in-law knew all this but did nothing.
“Where there isn’t aggression, there is an apathy towards women and their sexuality,” says writer Mridula Garg, who wrote about marital sex abuse in her story Tuk. The story is told in the first person about a woman deeply in love with her husband who uses her for sex and rapes her one evening after losing at bridge. “Indian men” Garg says, “don’t know and don’t care about a woman’s satisfaction.” This disregard extends to her well-being, her diet, her likes and dislikes. Garg and Dr Shetty both point out the inability of many men to deal with a woman who has an independent mind. To deal with her husband’s inferiority, to keep him happy, even a high-earning, confident-seeming upper middle class woman will revert to the pliant type when the husband has senior colleague over for dinner.
Our unwillingness to criminalise marital rape should force us to ask questions about what marriage means in our society. What are these traditional family values that the Parliamentary Standing Committee is so afraid will weaken were husbands who rape their wives sent to prison? Is the state really so intent on preserving an outmoded, irrelevant male dominance? And if the Indian marriage is so resistant to change, so indifferent to female sexuality, so ungenerous and inequitable, is it worth saving? If traditional values mean men continue to have it all their own way, expect those values to soon be discarded on the dustheap of an unbecoming history.
aradhna@tehelka.com

The Sanctification of Malala Yousafzai

Ajachi Chakrabarti

23/10/2013

The medium or the message? Malala with her father Ziauddin — **The medium or the message?** Malala with her father Ziauddin. Photo: AFP

The subtitle for Malala Yousafzai’s autobiography, I Am Malala, seeks to ensure that casual browsers at bookshops aren’t confused in the least. “The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban,” it proclaims. If a poll were to be held on what people know about the youngest nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, that subtitle would probably sum up the response of the overwhelming majority.
Ever since she was shot in the head last year by a member of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) while returning home from school, the canonisation of Malala has been swift and sure. It’s every spin doctor’s dream: a teenaged Muslim girl standing up to Muslim fundamentalism and nearly dying as a result, a champion of Western values who can easily be cast as a hero in a complex, alien culture that the West has proven to be historically inept at understanding. A person who can be reduced to a tagline on a book cover. Helen Keller, Anne Frank and Joan of Arc rolled into one.
Of course, the obvious way in which TV anchors, politicians and celebrities have fallen over each other in a mad rush to anoint her and use her to further their own agenda — Rahman Malik, for instance, held up Malala’s parents’ efforts to reach Birmingham and be by her side because he wanted to go with them for a photo-op — has led to a backlash against Malala that ranges from the uncharitable to the downright vicious. She has been accused of lusting for publicity, of blasphemy, of even faking her own shooting in order to leave Pakistan and live comfortably abroad, a claim that thankfully died down once the TTP took responsibility for the attack. Op-ed pieces are regularly churned out by both sides, each accusing the other with increasing viciousness of misunderstanding and misrepresenting Malala’s message.
Reading Malala’s book is an instructive exercise in understanding her, once you get past the sanctimonious declarations she makes; expected, given the number of times she has said she wants to some day be Prime Minister of Pakistan. (“At night I would pray, ‘God, give me Sanju’s pencil [from her favourite television show, Shaka Laka Boom Boom]… I will use it to make everyone happy.’”) It is as much her story as it is of her father, Ziauddin, a Swati activist who was one of the most prominent voices in the Valley against the Taliban. Her ideas are received from her father, whom she idolises. Most of what she has to say about politics begins with some variant of “My father used to say…”
It was Ziauddin who founded the Khushal School where Malala studied, who refused to allow the Taliban to close the school once they invaded Swat. It was he who founded the Swat Qaumi Jirga, which came together to politically oppose the Taliban, largely by highlighting their excesses in the media. As journalists began covering the situation, they found his young, articulate daughter saying much the same things, a far more compelling interviewee. When Christina Lamb, a veteran Pakistan correspondent who has ghostwritten the book, met Ziauddin in Birmingham, he reminded her that she had interviewed him in 2009. “In those days people wanted to talk to me, not my daughter,” he had joked.
Ultimately, it was the fame Malala gained as a result of these interviews that got her shot, not her efforts to promote education, which consisted mainly of delivering platitudes about its importance at different fora. The Taliban by 2012 had largely been driven out of Swat, and there really wasn’t much of an opposition to girls’ education. Shooting Malala was an ill-conceived attempt at reasserting their authority in the Valley, which had been lost through the efforts of the military, not activists. It was a political act, part of a ruthless winner-take-all war in the region.
Earlier this month, Dawn published an obviously satirical piece, where they claimed that DNA analysis of Malala’s earwax and an extended investigation had revealed that Malala wasn’t really Malala, but a Polish Christian called Jane. That she had been killed by an Italian Robert de Niro lookalike (“Those tiny yellow bits that you see in the wax are bits of pizza,” their alleged expert said, asking the writer to look at the assailant’s earwax under a microscope). Despite a disclaimer at the bottom, later also posted at the top, a large section of commenters as well as those on social media were fooled.
The episode demonstrates how, in this cynical age, we are willing to give currency to even the most bizarre conspiracy theories regarding Malala. Incidents like this have been used by the Western media to illustrate that Pakistani society harbours resentment against Malala due to some vague jealousy at the amount of attention she’s been getting.
But in choosing to slay that straw man, Malala’s cheerleaders ignore the real reasons for the dissatisfaction. Malala is by no means the only person in Pakistan, or even Swat, to have spoken out against, or even to be shot for speaking out against the patriarchal notion that girls should not be educated. Neither has she done anything tangible to promote education in the region, though she has donated most of the money she has been awarded to a fund for girls’ education. Nor was she highlighting an extraordinarily bad situation; the province of Khyber Pakhtunwa, of which Swat is a part, has female enrolment numbers that, while by no means great, outperform the country as a whole. Yes, education of girls is an issue of great importance in Pakistani society, but it isn’t a game of heroes and villains, rather a complicated interplay of tradition, political expediency and the volatile state the country finds itself in.

I Am Malala Malala Yousafzai (with Christina Lamb) Hachette 276 pp | Rs 399 — I Am Malala
Malala Yousafzai (with Christina Lamb)
Hachette
276 pp | Rs 399

So when Western television anchors use Malala’s story to demonstrate the backwardness of the Taliban, and by extension Islam, they completely ignore the role the West has played in maintaining that volatility. Malala herself hasn’t rocked the boat – she has seldom spoken out against the consequences of the US War on Terror, even though the influx of the Taliban into Swat was a direct result. But when she did speak out, telling Barack Obama that drone strikes would cause terrorism to intensify — there was no mention of the 150 or so schoolchildren that drones have killed in Pakistan — that particular comment was completely ignored in the coverage given to her high-profile meeting.
The American media’s sense of righteousness also displays their Islamophobia – it is a politically correct form of racism that has characterised most of its engagement with this alien culture ever since 9/11. But the same anchors who laud Malala’s courage in standing up to the oppression of religion have for years given free publicity to fundamental Christians who fought to have the theory of evolution expunged from the school curriculum, and to ‘experts’ who deny that climate change is real. They also ignore that Malala and her family are practising Muslims, whose faith in Islam never wavered despite them having to engage in an ideological battle with the Taliban on a daily basis. That despite his bluster, even Ziauddin made a series of compromises with the Taliban in order to keep his school open.
Malala Yousafzai had greatness thrust upon her in the form of an assassin’s bullet. That one brutal, senseless act changed a precocious child with political ambitions into a cause célèbre. But in the reams that have been written about Malala ever since that act, not one concrete suggestion has emerged that will carry tangible benefits for girls, or boys, who are denied an education. Like with all icons, the medium has become more important than the message.
“When people talk about the way I was shot and what happened,” she writes at the end of her book, “I think it’s the story of Malala; ‘a girl shot by the Taliban’; I don’t feel it’s a story about me at all.”

'Captain Phillips' fudges facts when it comes to the actions of the protagonist

Ajachi Chakrabarti

21/10/2013

The facts, as they stand, are these. On 8 April 2009, the American cargo ship MV Maersk Alabama was 300 miles off the Somali coast. A general warning had been issued by the US authorities to all ships, and a specific one to the ship’s captain Richard Phillips, asking them to keep at least 600 miles between them and piracy-ridden Somalia. Captain Phillips chose to ignore the warnings in order to chart the fastest course to Mombasa. They were boarded by four pirates, aged between 17 and 19. Phillips was taken hostage, but the rest of the crew, led by First Engineer Mike Perry, managed to hide and disable the ship. According to the accounts of several crew members, an intermittent gun battle ensued, lasting 33 hours, after which Perry and his men captured one pirate. They exchanged prisoners – allegedly at the request of Captain Phillips – but the pirates grabbed Phillips and dashed off in the ship’s lifeboat. They attempted to reach Somalia, but were immediately faced with the might of the US Navy.
Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips, the cinematic account of the first hijacking of an American ship since the 19th century, tells a slightly different story. For one, no mention is made of the fact that Phillips endangered his crew by ignoring the advisories. In fact, on a radar display, the Alabama is shown significantly to the east of the commercial shipping route. His crew, a substantial portion of which has since joined a lawsuit against Maersk for Phillips’ recklessness, is jittery about being in troubled waters. Their completely reasonable fear is put in stark relief to Phillips’ Hollywood leading man grit; they are shown as fearful jobbers hiding behind union regulations and are told they signed up for this (no, they didn’t). Their resistance, in truth largely the result of Perry’s ingenuity, is shown as Phillips improvising and sending directions to his crew through cryptic hints.
In all other aspects, the film remains faithful to real events, taking very few liberties even where they could justifiably have been taken. Captain Phillips only fudges facts when it comes to the actions of Phillips himself. That isn’t particularly surprising, considering that the film is based on Phillips’ memoir of the hijacking, which has, like the film, been criticised by crew members as inaccurate and biased.
Now, it’s nobody’s argument that films based on real life have to remain faithful to the exact sequence of events. But there has to be justification for the fictions; they have to work to make the plot more compelling. By making the story all about Phillips, especially by having him issue the instructions in the crew’s resistance of the hijackers instead of showing it as a United 93-style desperate battle, Greengrass passes the chance to show genuine human drama in favour of making his protagonist look good.
What Greengrass mines for his drama are not the hostages, but the pirates themselves. And it is in Barkhad Abzi’s performance as Abduwali Muse that we get anything resembling a believable three-dimensional character. Muse is, like his accomplices, a teenager rapidly coming to terms with how far over his head he is getting. (Comparisons can and have been made to the Tea Party during the government shutdown.) Those last few moments, with the giant spotlight (of the USS Halyburton) squarely on him, show a boy being asked to become a man, but who doesn’t quite know how. By contrast, Tom Hanks seems too assured in his portrayal of Phillips, too often preening for the Oscar jury by injecting feeling that might look good on camera, but doesn’t somehow seem honest enough to make a truly relatable character.

'Shahid' leaves you with more questions than answers

Ajachi Chakrabarti

21/10/2013

Unlike Captain Phillips, Hansal Mehta’s Shahid does not ignore shades of grey when it comes to dealing with its real-life protagonist, Shahid Azmi. It does not dwell on them either. Both, Azmi’s brief tryst with terrorism and the impact of his tumultuous life on his marriage get enough screen time to be deemed worthy of our attention, but the film doesn’t make much of a coherent point on either. The only time in the film that Azmi (Rajkumar Yadav) is forced to confront his past, the response of this man who was known as much for his candour as for his courage, is a blustered rant with the refrain “I could sue you for this, but I won’t”.
Now, it’s not that I hated that scene. In fact, that is more or less the reaction that anybody would have if their past was brought up by an opposing counsel during a trial where their innocent client’s freedom was at stake. But that is the only time we are given a chance to understand exactly how Azmi felt about his past (apart from a similar reaction when he reads a newspaper report calling him a ‘reformed radical’). It shouldn’t have been the only time, and if it had to be, it should have been better written.
That is a major part of what is wrong with Shahid, a film that does a decent job articulating the ideas Azmi stood for, but which is hapless in its efforts to articulate just who Azmi was. That’s a shame, because the film’s message is one that a large section of the population would do well to pay attention to.
Shahid Azmi was a human rights lawyer, who defended, among others, innocent Muslim youths who were picked up by the police after terror attacks. At a time when this practice earned the police nothing but good publicity for having made progress in its investigation and the accused’s guilt was accepted as a matter of course by the police, judiciary and the general public, Azmi was one of the few who stepped up and fought to get these youths justice. Who pointed out to society that the State’s terror policy of finding a suspect first and worrying about evidence later meant the destruction of an innocent’s life, while the actual perpetrators roamed free.
The court scenes illustrate the absurdities of our terror trials. I’m glad that Mehta and his co-writers didn’t go for the easy crutch of the dramatic court speech. Instead, they provide a realistic representation of how these trials are conducted, how the prosecutors try their best at delaying the progress of the case even when the guilt of the accused has ceased to be a matter for debate. As prosecutor More, Vipin Sharma is excellent, adding to what is already a long list of impressive performances in his career. He plays up the tragicomedy of the situation perfectly in his banter with Yadav during the trial.
But if Mehta passes up the chance for drama in his court proceedings, he fails to compensate in the rest of the film. I don’t know if it’s a case of him looking at Azmi with rose-tinted glasses — Azmi’s extraordinary life makes that not too serious a flaw — but the film struggles to approach him objectively. It’s not just that it doesn’t adequately address the baggage he carries because of his past, Shahid fails to determine what drives him. (The two, I suspect, are inter-related.) The sheer number of dramatic events that happened to Azmi in his brief life — he was just 32 when he was killed — are possibly too much to stuff into one film, but the film’s solution of addressing each of them briefly without substantiating any of them seems . It writes him a romantic angle that resembles just that, an angle thrown in to satisfy some notion of what would make the story more palatable. But when Azmi’s wife, tired of the constant drama in her life, decides to bail, nothing more is made of it.
It’s a rule of journalism that if a piece leaves you with more questions than answers, it’s not a very good piece. Shahid, while a crucially important film for what it has to say about our country, like Captain Phillips, proves that the rule applies to films as well, at least those which deal with real events.

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Guns Don’t Kill People, Bad Prose Does

Ajachi Chakrabarti

18/10/2013

Grisham in the making? Ravi Subramanian — **Grisham in the making?** Ravi Subramanian

It’s one of the most clichéd pieces of advice given to new authors of fiction, both literary and commercial. Write what you know. It’s good advice; one of the worst things a new author can do is seem inauthentic. Indian commercial writers certainly follow it to the T, with a conveyor belt of engineers writing about being engineers, bankers writing about being bankers, college students writing about being college students.
In Bankerupt, his sixth book (in six years; “If you want your books to be read, you have to constantly be producing work,” he says), banker-author Ravi Subramanian drifts from Twain’s maxim by penning a tale that, despite its title, has only a tangential connection to banking. Instead, it is about two subjects that Subramanian cannot legitimately claim to know: the murky US debate on gun rights and the murkier waters of the politics in American academia.
Subramanian readily acknowledges that he knew little about the issues. “I knew about banking,” he says during a phone interview, “but I had only interacted with Indian academics.” He read up on the subjects in order to seem authentic, read Glenn Beck in order to understand the motivations behind the gun lobby, spoke to professors he knew in the US to understand the pressures of getting tenure. He even sent his manuscript to a number of academics to ensure there were no obvious logical errors.
But there’s the thing about ‘write what you know’. Author Nathan Englander calls it the “most misunderstood piece of advice there is”. “What it is, is empathic advice,” he says in a video on the website Big Think. “It is advice about feeling.” What Subramanian has done in Bankerupt is lay out the primary contours of the gun debate and weave them into a thriller. Logically, Subramanian assures me, there is nothing wrong with Bankerupt. But emotionally, he is consistently off-key.
So we have the Bollywoodesque opening image of a weeping Bill Clinton confronting a portrait of Thomas Jefferson after the Columbine massacre. “‘You,’ he said. ‘You are the one responsible for this, Mr President. You. Thomas Jefferson. I blame you.'” (Jefferson’s crime, the book explains, was insisting on an inviolable Bill of Rights, which gave the US both freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.) It’s a clumsy, cartoonish moment included both for “entertainment” as well as exposition.
Thankfully, the melodrama is restricted to that one scene, and the book immediately moves on to the murder mystery at its heart. A conscious decision, Subramanian says, keeping his audience in mind. “Normally, people are willing to give you a few chapters before deciding whether they will continue with the book.” Continuing to talk about what is essentially an alien issue for his primarily Indian readership would have put off readers. The debate shows up later in the book, where the characters tell each other, and the reader, what the various issues are (thus ignoring the second most frequent piece of literary advice: show, don’t tell). These conversations, however, are the opposite of that opening outburst, sterile pieces of exposition that never acknowledge the deep emotions that fuel both sides of the debate.

Bankerupt Ravi Subramanian Penguin 320 pp; Rs 299 — **Bankerupt**
Ravi Subramanian
Penguin, **320 pp; Rs 299**

But then again, Bankerupt is not really about gun rights, or academia, or even banking. It is, like Subramanian’s previous books, a morality tale against greed. It’s a good thing, gratifying even, for a banker to be writing about right and wrong, but he has been criticised in the past for being too simplistic about it, for creating characters who represent either extreme, and having bad things happen to the bad guys in the end. Subramanian, who is noted for listening to his readers, has, after taking into account some of the negative feedback, toned down the moral absolutism somewhat. Also, when he talks about greed from the point of view of a professor bending the rules of academia for greater research grants, he is genuinely interesting.
But Subramanian himself may justifiably be accused of bending the rules for greater sales. “The John Grisham of banking,” the Wall Street Journal calls him in a blurb on the cover. It’s actually a title he came up with himself. In an interview with Khushita Vasant for the Journal’s ‘India Realtime’ blog, the introduction mentions that his website says that it is a title he aspires to; at no point does Vasant actually call him that. The phrase is, however, mentioned in the headline — “Meet the ‘John Grisham of banking'” — which Subramanian and his publishers printed as a blurb for his previous book, Bankster. In Bankerupt, the word ‘meet’ is conveniently dropped, as are the quote marks, making it sound like a ringing endorsement from a reputed international newspaper.
Whatever be the propriety of publishing such a claim, it is a title that has come to be associated with Subramanian. For a writer of commercial fiction, those are big shoes to fill. Bankerupt is easily Subramanian’s best effort till date, but if he is to come anywhere close to Grisham’s skills at providing insight, information, drama and, above all, authenticity, he has a long, long way to go.
ajachi@tehelka.com

‘The original Mastram wrote erotica, not filth’

Aradhna Wal

18/10/2013

Akhilesh Jaiswal | 28 Filmmaker — **Akhilesh Jaiswal**, 28, Filmmaker

Edited Excerpts from an interview
How did Mastram, the film, come about?
The idea for Mastram came many years ago when I was in school. In the 1990s, every home did not have a TV set. There was no Internet. We had just a few ways of entertaining ourselves. Also, that was the age when we were all curious about sex. That’s how I started reading Mastram. Reading the books, I often wondered, what does this man tell his family? Many years later, when Gangs of Wasseypur was in post-production, I came back to this idea. After much research, however, I found nothing on the man himself. So we made a fictional account of his life. I approached Ajay Rai, the producer of the film, whom I knew since the Gangs of Wasseypur days. He liked the script. All the crew members are friends who’ve come aboard without any personal fee. If the film does well, they’ll get paid.
Considering there is very little information available on the man himself, what sort of research went into the making of the film?
I tried researching Mastram first in Bhopal, then in Delhi, places where I had contacts. We went hunting for small, old-time publishers. However, most haven’t survived. And so we tried reverse tracing the books from the market, but only got to the wholesale dealers. Beyond that, either no one knew who the writer was or no one wanted to tell us. We couldn’t even find out where the books were printed. The idea was to produce a fictional account, but it was impossible to get even a few facts to add to our story.
Did his writing help you construct the character?
It was a very difficult process. Perhaps once people watch the film, they will disagree with my interpretation of the writer. But for me, Mastram was not a bad guy. So what if he wrote porn? I have shown him as a good man, a good family man who wants to be a writer. He tries to follow his dreams, but with financial burdens and people rejecting his other writings, he eventually starts writing porn.
Mastram’s depiction of sex was vivid, even believed to be crude. How did you deal with it?
The original Mastrams were quite artistic. Later, as others began to use that name, the writing turned vulgar; it became a business. We spoke to the older readers of Mastram, who remembered how good the writing was. In the film, we have shown what he writes visually, with a voiceover reading his works out loud. It’s been done aesthetically. In the original Mastram, there is erotica, not filth.
Do you think the titillating factor will help draw crowds?
Well, I’m not making a porn film, am I? Some might be disappointed with the movie, but I have not kept the audience in mind while making the film. However, I think even they will find something to like in this movie.
You wrote Gangs of Wasseypur. Has that experience helped you while making Mastram?
I always wanted to make films. As a child, I would steal Rs 20 every Friday to watch movies. Cinema was everyone’s pastime in Bhopal. Soon, I was able to pinpoint mistakes in the scripts of other movies. But after moving to Mumbai, working backstage in theatre groups and making small Marathi ad films, my big break was writing Gangs of Wasseypur. Being on the sets of that film was my learning experience. I saw how a film is made and what all the director is responsible for.
aradhna@tehelka.com

‘Journalism made me see cinema as more than just entertainment’

Aradhna Wal

18/10/2013

Janaki Vishwanathan 43, Filmmaker — **Janaki Vishwanathan** 43, Filmmaker
Photo: Balaji Maheshwar

How did you get into filmmaking?
If someone had told me 15 years ago that I would be making films, I would have laughed. It was writing that I had always been interested in, from school onwards. So journalism seemed like a natural choice. I have worked in both print and electronic media. I think, making films was then a natural progression. I am more of a communicator than a filmmaker. This is another medium.
How did your National Award-winning film Kutty come about?
After leaving my job with a TV network, I had started dabbling in documentaries that were supported by some friends and by the Ford Foundation. One of the last interviews I had done for the network was with Santosh Sivan, who had then won a National Award. He asked me to try making films. I suppose a seed was sown that day. That’s when Sivasankari, the Tamil novelist and activist whom I was close to, gave me her novel Kutty, which many others wanted to make into a film.
What draws you to your topics — child labour and devdasis?
My training as a journalist made me pick on something that has a basis in reality. Also, I ceased to see cinema as just entertainment. It’s more than that. It can entertain but also inform. Even in mainstream cinema, the issues that these films talk about come from society. It’s the treatment that dilutes the issues for entertainment.
Why use fiction then, instead of the documentary style?
Coming from Tamil Nadu, I cannot tell you how much of an impact cinema has had on our society, on our politics. Even in the rest of the country, cinema is an undeniable influence on our culture, even if it cannot be quantified. Someone who had seen Kutty called me once to say that he had taken his maid servant, who was a little girl, back to her parents’ house and was sponsoring her education. Even one call like that makes it worthwhile.
Is Yeh Hai Bakrapur, your latest film, a departure from the style of Kutty?
In a sense, yes. Though the topic is as serious as those of my previous movies, I’ve adopted a satirical tone, given it a comic treatment. Also, this is my first Hindi film. The change in language, however, did not affect me much, as I am familiar with Hindi.

‘My stories capture the horror as well as the beauty of life’

Ajachi Chakrabarti

18/10/2013

Meghna Pant | 33 Writer — **Meghna Pant**, 33, Writer

EDITED EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW
Where do the stories of Happy Birthday come from?
The stories in Happy Birthday are formed and developed keeping only moments in mind, those epiphanic moments when the character or plot or truth or all of the above reveal themselves, most often without even knowing it. And it all comes together or falls apart. Exactly like life. As a writer, I remain very curious. And I am not afraid of doing stuff, of failing and falling, and loving and laughing.
You begin your collection with a poem by Maya Angelou, which celebrates the sameness of human nature irrespective of their backgrounds. In what ways do you think the diverse characters in your book are alike?

I’m happy that you brought up the poem because I couldn’t believe that 40 words could so effectively summarise my entire book. We are all similar in that we’re all groping in the dark and waiting for someone to shine the light on our disarrayed emotions and experiences. What then distinguishes us is this little thing called courage.
One man’s hill is another man’s mountain. How they surmount it, what they see from the peak and what they become is what my characters embody.

Happy Birthday: and other stories meghna pant Random House 296 pp; Rs 299 — **Happy Birthday: And Other Stories |** Meghna Pant | Random House, 296 pp; Rs 299

Your stories seem to eschew happy endings, awarding your protagonists, at best, with little triumphs. Is that a policy you follow consciously?
I wouldn’t call them happy endings as much as having the final arc of the story thrown into sharp relief. The whole point of my stories is to capture duality, the beauty and horror that is our life. This duality also exists within each person, each situation and each conscious conviction we hold. I walk my characters through the ring of fire and then let them find the way around their own ending. They need, as we all do, these little triumphs — as you call them — to keep going. I like to call it hope.
There’s a lot of handwringing, if not open conflict, when it comes to relationships between parents and their children. Are the two generations fundamentally different when it comes to core values?
In my stories, I’ve used love as a framing device to capture the difference in core values between parents and their children. It is undoubtedly the purest form of love, yet it is often misplaced, throttling or damaging. The Gecko On The Wall captures an entitled daughter raised by a father who doesn’t know where to place his love. In The Gola Master, a man watches his son lured away by the things that he is unable to provide him. But I think that it takes a story like Lemon and Chilli to capture the crux of the inert psychosis that exists between parents and their children. It shows that the world is in a constant reproduction of itself. Every person, every generation wants to be greater than the sum part of their dreams and pockets. In that we unite, in that we divide, in that we love and we hate.
ajachi@tehelka.com

Khandwa jailbreak: The men of the not-so-great escape

Ajit Sahi

17/10/2013

Missing men (From top) Abu Faisal Khan, Mehboob, Amjad, Mohammad Aslam, Mohammad Aijazuddin and Zakir Hussain — **Missing men** (From top) Abu Faisal Khan, Mehboob, Amjad, Mohammad Aslam, Mohammad Aijazuddin and Zakir Hussain

Although it it began unusually with a camel, the story of the terror cases against the six men who escaped from a Madhya Pradesh prison this month has a familiar pattern. An overwhelming number of Muslim men accused of terrorism across India over the past decade or so have been found to be framed. Many were freed after years of incarceration had ruined their lives. But an acquittal does not lessen the risk of being named in fresh cases. And every acquittal earned is outmatched by 10 new accused grabbed elsewhere.
The question is, if most are innocent, why do the police specifically pick them? But the police rarely target specific men. It is most often a petty criminal, or a hot-headed youth, or simply a young man at the wrong place at the wrong time crossing the path of some cop. A short hop brings in families, neighbours and friends into the net of terror cases, as had happened with the men who escaped from Khandwa town’s prison on 1 October.
This story begins with Mohammad Khalil, although he is not among the escapees. A resident of Khandwa who rented out his autorickshaws for a living, Khalil teamed up with other Muslims in 2006 to buy a camel to slaughter as a holy offering. The police chief, however, seized the animal to “protect Hindu-Muslim peace”. The Muslims demanded to know the law banning camel slaughter. “They had a heated argument,” recalls Khalil’s brother, Javed Chauhan, a city lawyer. Khalil moved court. Two years later, a judge ordered the camel be given back to him. The police filed the camel’s post-mortem report.
Of course, the case was already irrelevant. In the interim, the police had filed a slew of cases against Khalil, accusing him of rioting and breaching communal peace, among others. Khalil would later be acquitted of all charges. In 2007, Khalil and two others riding on his motorcycle ran into a neighbourhood rival. There were fisticuffs. Both sides filed cases. One of Khalil’s companions named Amjad, a petty labourer with no previous police record, became a witness. But police took sides as a henchman of Khalil’s rival who, too, was present there, was a “pocket witness”, or one who deposes regularly for the prosecution.
Although a compromise was reached and the cases withdrawn, the police accused Khalil of making sectarian speeches in April 2008 under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), a draconian law from 1967 routinely slapped on Muslims accused of terrorism. The police also arrested Amjad, accusing him of storing publications of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), an outfit banned since 2001 for alleged terror activities.
Both arrests were based only on the confession of two other men arrested for allegedly distributing banned SIMI literature. Six months ago, Amjad was acquitted in that case. His lawyer says the prosecution’s chargesheet laid out no offence against his name. But the police arrested him again in June 2011, claiming they nabbed him and 14 others as they met to plan terror acts. Incredibly, a week before that arrest, Amjad’s family had moved court alleging the police had illegally picked him and were refusing to release him. Would he be so idiotic to go plan a conspiracy a week after a plea was moved in his name?
In November 2011, police accused Amjad of a more serious charge, the murder of a city policeman named Sitaram Yadav. A year before Yadav’s murder, Amjad’s family had moved court claiming Yadav had forcibly taken him away and was torturing him in illegal confinement. The court dismissed the plea on the technicality that the family had not correctly named Yadav’s department. Weeks later, Yadav arrested Amjad under UAPA. Amjad was subsequently acquitted of the terror charges. But he was already being tried for Yadav’s murder. On 1 October, Amjad escaped from Khandwa prison with five others.
Mehboob is another escapee. A tailor who lived in a thatch-roofed hut with his parents, Mehboob picked up odd stitching jobs from city tailoring shops. In a good month, he could earn up to Rs 4,000. He, too, never had a single case against him until 2008 when the police booked him in the same case they filed against Khalil and Amjad, because, says his family, he lived in the neighbourhood and on occasion had interacted with Amjad.
Accused of spreading communal hatred, Mehboob has since been acquitted. But he has numerous other cases, including murder attempts on the city’s RSS-BJP leaders and for Yadav’s murder. All the police have is his alleged confession that is anyway inadmissible as evidence. At the first opportunity, he told a judge he had never signed a confession, but the case goes on. His mother works odd jobs. His father has since turned a beggar.

Exit strategy The Khandwa prison from where the six undertrials escaped — **Exit strategy** The Khandwa prison from where the six undertrials escaped

Zakir too escaped on 1 October. He dropped out of school after Class X for lack of money to pay his fees. Before his name ever came up in terror cases, he worked as a construction labourer first and then as a masonry apprentice. “He quickly became the city’s most sought-after mason,” says Praveen Dube, an insurance agent. But when police picked up some neighbours of his age after a Hindu-Muslim quarrel in 2008, Zakir panicked and fled. That was a terrible mistake. The police began hounding his kin. When they couldn’t find him, they took in a brother of his named Altaf.
In June 2011, police claimed they arrested Zakir from the railway station in Ratlam city, 250 km from Khandwa, after a shootout in which he took a bullet. Since then, he has been named in various cases of murder or attempt to murder for which most of the other escapees, too, have been booked. Once again, all the police have is a confession that his lawyer says he never made. On the night he escaped from Khandwa prison, Zakir’s brother Altaf, too, was in the same prison ward. Accused of lesser charges, he didn’t flee.
But among the escapees, there is one man who confessed in open court to murdering Yadav, the policeman. “Sitaram Yadav used to beat us mercilessly and force us to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’,” Abu Faisal, a doctor by education and one of the escapees, told a judge after his arrest. “I shot him to death and sent him to hell.”
ajit@tehelka.com

Why Khandwa jailbreak story doesn't add up

Ajit Sahi

17/10/2013

[cycloneslider id=”khandwa-jailbreak”]
Nineteen years after it had wrested the area from the Marathas, the East India Company built a prison in Khandwa town of Madhya Pradesh. The Company and the British viceroyalty that succeeded it are long gone. But the stone-and-mortar edifice of 1837 stands much the same, decaying from nearly two centuries of passive neglect, forlorn amid a wild brush that sways to a pleasant October breeze. Not for this prison the smart floodlit nights and 24×7 CCTV of others. Here, prisoner watch is still 19th-century.
Which is what, the police say, made it easy as a pie for seven of its inmates to make a daring predawn escape on 1 October. That six of them were undertrials accused of terrorism made their flight a national news break.
Those six escapees, who are between 25 and 35 years old, are alleged to be members of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), an alleged terror outfit proscribed since 2001. At the time they vanished, literally, into the night, they faced charges of murder, loot and conspiracies to foment terrorist acts. (The seventh man was caught just five hours later most bizarrely. More on that later.)
The official story of the escape, however, challenges credulity. Authorities have yet failed to explain why they lodged the men in the same ward although the jail has six. Indeed, precisely because Khandwa’s jail is not secure enough, these men, four of whom are Khandwa’s natives, had for years lodged in more fortified prisons elsewhere and were brought back only for court hearings. They had arrived only two weeks before the escape.
Officials say the prisoners removed an iron rod fixed in a wall in their ward and used the rod to punch a 1.5ft x 1.5ft hole in the wall of an attached toilet. But wouldn’t hammering a wall, however softly, risk being heard in the still night? The prison is less than 100m x 100m on the outside. Yet, the four guards on duty heard not one sound. Wouldn’t there be debris if a hammer was used? And why didn’t they leave the hammer behind like they did the iron rod? An official guesses that the escapees didn’t use the hammer but chipped away at the wall, moving one brick at a time. In that case, how long did they take to break the wall? May be an hour, he says. Can such a big hole be carved out so quickly?
Yusuf, who has no second name, has been in and out of Khandwa’s prison for two decades. Patriarch to the town’s busiest petty crime family (half-a-dozen of his clansmen are always in the cooler), he knows the prison’s innards like the back of his palms. Slouching on a smelly cot outside his one-roomed shack in a city slum one night, Yusuf shakes his head in disbelief. “That wall is at least two-brick thick,” he says puffing on his beedi and using his fingers and a thumb to show that thickness. “I’m amazed they broke it in an hour.” (The mystery of the soundlessly broken wall may never resolve as the toilet has been razed.)
And how did the prisoners negotiate the prison’s 16-foot-high outer wall? “By climbing on top of each other,” deadpans an officer probing the case. Such was the hurry to push this theory that the state’s Director-General of Prisons, Surendra Singh, who visited that day from Bhopal, the capital, marched seven men to the wall for the simulation. “We chose men of the same built as the escapees,” says an official. “They did it in 40 seconds.”
But the escaped prisoners’ lawyer Javed Chauhan dismisses the suggestion. “One limps,” he says. “Years of incarceration have emaciated them; they can barely hold their weight.”
Moreover, with no witnesses, how did the officials know where to simulate the act? By the two bedsheets they used as rope. So who found the bedsheets and when and where?
Wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Perhaps my greatest skill lies in concealing my hidden talent”, one of the five prison officials suspended for negligence in the jailbreak is philosophical over the rap on his knuckles. He pegs the escape at around 3.30 am and its discovery at 75 minutes later when guards found the headcount short. “We rang the siren,” he says. “When we couldn’t find them inside, we ran out.” The dark hampered the search. When day broke, the search party noticed white vertical patches on the outside of a wall. They decided the escapees made them while sliding down. Were the bedsheets there?
No, says the official. The police found the bedsheets later and he doesn’t know where. But the prison’s new superintendent, Puran Singh Baderia, who was rushed to the job hours after the escape, insists the bedsheets were found inside by the wall. “I saw them lying in a heap exactly where the men had climbed up,” he says.
Khandwa city Superintendent of Police (SP) Abhishek Deewan gave a third version, claiming the warders found the bedsheets outside the wall. Incredibly, no forensic experts were called in to inspect the wall’s marks.
Suresh Tiwari, a 50-year-old beat policeman without a firearm, was on patrol that night with an armed constable half his age riding pillion. As the rains had ruined the roads, the younger man offered to drive. Tiwari slung his companion’s rifle on his shoulder and sat behind. Around 3.15 am, they stopped to chat with another motorbike patrol half a mile behind the prison. About 3.30 am, two men they stopped for a check told the policemen a few “suspicious looking Muslims” were hurrying their way.
Once again, there is a mismatch between the versions of the patrolmen. Tiwari says their two motorbikes were right next to each other when the escapees showed up. When the other bike’s driver, Narendra Soni, asked the men where they were headed, one of them screamed, “Maro (hit them).” Tiwari says both his rider and Soni ran away while the escapees wrestled him and Soni’s pillion rider, Lokesh Hirve, to the ground. “They stabbed us and tried to snatch our rifles,” Tiwari recalled a week later recuperating at his home.
The attackers took the rifles but couldn’t rip the bandolier off Hirve’s waist. (Tiwari had none as he was holding his companion’s rifle.) They escaped on the policemen’s motorcycles. Barely breathing, Tiwari picked up his walkie-talkie and spoke to SP Deewan. Tiwari insists no more words were exchanged between the police and escapees. But Hirve claims he recognised one of the seven Muslim men as a “SIMI undertrial” he had earlier taken to court hearings. “I asked him, ‘When were you freed? Have you been bailed?’” he says. Confronted, the men panicked and attacked the policemen.
If Hirve had indeed identified an escapee, why didn’t the police rush to the prison nearby to check? (The prison staff would discover the escape over an hour later.) In the third telling, Soni varies from Tiwari in one crucial detail. “When the escapees came up to us, my companion and I were about 10-15 feet behind Tiwari’s motorcycle,” he told TEHELKA. Curiously, the six terror accused left the seventh escapee behind. Even more curiously, the police claim this escapee went up the terrace of a house nearby and went off to sleep.
Newspapers said he jumped off a ledge when the householder’s wife went to the terrace at sunrise. When she screamed, “Stop, thief!” the neighbours quickly apprehended him, handing him to a police party that showed up right away.
But when TEHELKA met the woman and her husband outside their house gate, he claimed it was he who had gone up the terrace. “I was scared,” he says haltingly. “The police have told us to speak to no one.”

Mysteriously, even before noon, the police had begun to anonymously leak to local hacks that the men had escaped to a metre gauge railway station 16 km away and caught an outbound train.
Last week, an official at the sleepy station told TEHELKA the police arrived by lunchtime the same day and grilled the staff on the morning’s travellers. And indeed, a group of men wearing the typical flowing beards, the skullcap and long kurtas and loose pyjamas of Muslims had arrived at the station at 7.15 am and taken a train at 8.40 am.
Did the police have a premonition? Because it would be twilight before the two stolen motorcycles would be found abandoned on a patch of land a mile out from the encounter. A few metres ahead, local children would shortly find one of the two rifles. And even these discoveries hardly pointed a clear path to the distant railway station. Yet, the policemen went back the next day to the police station and its neighbouring village asking for leads.
On 3 October, around 9 am, Sukhram, a 50-year-old villager living at a farm on the outskirts of Khandwa, prepared to water his cotton fields. Within five minutes, he had found the other rifle lying across a narrow water channel under a cotton plant. “I immediately ran to the police and brought them over,” he told TEHELKA, showing around the spot where he found the .303 rifle. Strangely, Sukhram vouches that the rifle was spotless clean and dry, although it had rained through 1 and 2 October.
News videos show the police using used polythene packs to secure the rifle. They never asked the policemen who had been issued the rifles to identify them. “We checked their numbering and they matched,” an official said.
The police came back the next day with a sniffer dog because it had engaged elsewhere the previous day at a rally Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan attended. Police say the scent on a towel found by the gun led the dog to the train tracks 200 metres away. Sure enough, it took the tracks towards the railway station at Mordar village that the police had been visiting for two days already.
Although, the tired dog stopped about 3 km short of the railway station, this was seen as clinching evidence that the escapees indeed fled this way. Newspapers began to claim the escapees had been seen behaving shadily at the railway station, that they didn’t have enough money on them to buy tickets, and so on. In a couple days, sightings began to be reported of some of the men in towns in Maharashtra to the south of Khandwa.
But Sukhram, the farmer, denies there was a towel by the gun. And the railway official at the Mordar station told TEHELKA the travellers looked not the least like terrorists. “They were relaxed and calm and hardly seemed like prison escapees,” he says. “They had luggage and cooking utensils that I have seen Islamic preachers carry on travels.”
The man who bought the tickets for the next station at Gudi village seemed barely 18 years old. The official had also heard the party had gotten off at Gudi, about 15 km further out.
Nasiruddin Qasmi, the 34-year-old imam at the local mosque, has lived at Gudi since moving from a village in Bihar 13 years ago. TEHELKA met him at the mosque’s gate and asked him if he had heard of a party of six Muslim men getting off at the Gudi railway station on 1 October and behaving suspiciously. He led us inside and sat us down in the prayer hall.
“It was us who took the train that day from Mordar,” says Qasmi. Within minutes, most of the imam’s party of eight that day were crowding in the hall.
The group had left Gudi on 28 September for a village near Mordar for a three-day religious event. They had returned on 1 October catching the return train from Mordar.
They knew that the news media was mistaking them to be the escaped men. So why didn’t they just go meet the police and clear the air? “But we did,” says Qasmi. As early as 4 October, members of the group met with a local policemen and gave details of their visit.
Several policemen came over the next two days and grilled them extensively. They went back with photocopies of the men’s Aadhaar and ration cards. As well as the ticket stubs for that train journey. No, the police gave them no receipts for what they took away. The travellers are still waiting to read in the papers that the record has been set straight.
ajit@tehelka.com