Manoj and Babli

Suta Dogra Chander

Description

Highly recommended . . . this book exposes glimpses of the Dark Ages behind the window dressing of societies that often pose modernism as a policy for all else except for the dignity of women Asma Jahangir, ex-chairperson, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan This is the true story of the honour killing of Manoj and Babli and its aftermath. In this painstakingly researched book, Chander Suta Dogra recreates how the couple eloped, breaking the taboo of same-caste marriage, and were seized and brutalized by the girl s people, with their bodies being eventually dumped into a canal. Tacitly approving the deed, the village people did not attend the funeral; the tardiness of the local police and other agencies bordered on acquiescence. It was left to Manoj s mother, Chandrapati, and sister Seema to fight for justice. The book powerfully describes how, with the support of the media and women activists, they stood up to intimidation, social ostracism and the fury of the khaps or Jat councils across North India, not just Haryana, when the five accused were sentenced to death in a landmark judgement. The family still has police protection. Chilling and unputdownable, Manoj and Babli is a brilliant expos of the face-off between those who abide by the law and the upholders of archaic traditions that clash with it.

Sujets

• Humanities

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184757026
• Langue: English

Extrait

CHANDER SUTA DOGRA


Manoj and Babli A Hate Story
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Preface
Prologue
Part One: Love and Death
1. The Police Is Protecting Us
2. The Girl with the Silver Hoops
Part Two: The Aftermath
3. The Bodies Are Here
4. I Beg of You, Give Me Two Asthi Kalash
5. The Law Will Take Its Course
6. Just Name a Figure, Sir
7. Alone in Their Moment of Victory
Part Three: Full Circle
8. Voice of God?
9. Nothing Ever Remains the Same
10. Things Are Not the Same Now
Epilogue
Afterword
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS MANOJ AND BABLI
Chander Suta Dogra, earlier with Outlook magazine and now with The Hindu , has covered North India for two decades. She has travelled extensively in the heartlands of Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir for investigative reporting, often at great risk to herself, on issues ranging from caste and women to the agricultural crisis. This is her first book.
To Mandvi and Tigmanshu, my children
Preface
The first time I encountered an honour killing was in 2004, in a village near Meham, in the heartland of Haryana. A girl had been done to death by her father and brothers for eloping with a boy from a neighbouring village. When I went to her house, I found that the only one who was grieving for the girl and even prepared to say that she had been killed was her mother. The woman, who had probably seen her little girl being throttled to death, was distraught, but lacked the courage to defy her family and walk up to the police station two kilometres away to lodge a complaint.
She found in me a ready punching bag to vent an impotent fury. Where were you when my girl was being killed? Where were all these questions that you are directing at me now? I was confronted with the typical dilemma of a reporter: of how far I should probe to uncover the crime, knowing that it would mean scraping at layers of her still-raw wounds. Her raging helplessness remained with me for a long time, as I subsequently covered many more such incidents over the years.
With North India as my beat in Outlook -the weekly newsmagazine where I worked, till recently-I travelled extensively through Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, documenting cases, analysing causes and seeking countless opinions as I tried to comprehend the problem. Then, just when I thought I had explored the modern-day recurrence and spread of honour crimes from every possible angle, I received a call from Kamini Mahadevan of Penguin Books India.
She wanted me to do a book on honour killings and my first impulse was to refuse. What else could I possibly write on the subject? I had already written everything I knew in my articles, and to churn out another 70,000 words seemed quite impossible. Besides, how would I find the time for it? I already had my hands full, covering four states for Outlook . I discussed the offer with Ajith Pillai, the then senior editor at the magazine, who urged me to take it. He told me that I could do the research for the book along with my routine reporting and take a few months off to pen the manuscript. The next step was to convince Vinod Mehta, my editor, to give me leave for a few months towards the end. He readily agreed and now I really had no reason to dither.
This was in 2010, the year a sessions court in Karnal had delivered a landmark judgement in the well-known Manoj-Babli honour killing. For the first time, a court had sentenced to death those accused of killing for the sake of honour. I completely missed reporting on this important development because I was doing stories from other states the month the judgement came. By the time I returned to Haryana, newspapers had finished doing editorials on the judgement. Perhaps it was ordained that I would approach this case more comprehensively because the more I looked at this story, the more I realized that it should be my book. That, in hindsight, was the easy part.

Haryana is not a reporter s delight. It is hard to ferret out information here and at the best of times villagers can be taciturn, even suspicious of outsiders asking questions. You could be asking for serious trouble if you happen to pry into their social customs and traditions, especially something touchy like honour crimes. It took me about a year to research this book. From establishing contact with the families of Manoj and Babli, the couple who was killed for marrying into the same gotra, or sub-caste, to getting into the minds of khap leaders in order to understand their motivations.
The more I dug into the story, the more I realized that it was really the heroic struggle of two women, Seema and Chandrapati, who fought against debilitating odds to bring those responsible for the deaths of this young couple to justice. Both the women shared their hopes and struggles, their hardship and fears with me in person and in countless late-night phone conversations (which I continue to have with them). Late night, because that is the only time they can spare for lengthy recollections of their journey.
Seema, Manoj s sister, is a constable with the Haryana police, presently posted in the Madhuban police academy, and has a security cover at all times. She told me over the phone that if I wanted to meet her at the academy, where she has a small government flat, I would need permission from her superiors. I worked the channels from the office of the director general of police (DGP) downwards but the police officers would not let me meet her there. We eventually worked out a system. She would tell me when she was going to her village, Karoran, for the weekend and I would drive down from Chandigarh to meet the family.
I always visited during the afternoon siesta, when few people are about. I took care not to go to Chandrapati s house directly. The caution was rooted in my first experience of the village when I ran into a mixed bunch of young and old men playing cards under a tree. I had sought to draw them into a conversation about the honour killing that had taken place in their village, but was curtly put in my place. Behenji, ask us anything else about the village, but not about this case. It s a matter of our village honour and we are not prepared to discuss it with you, they said. Just like that. A deadpan delivery, tinged with menace. I changed tack and asked for the sarpanch. Accompanied by the sarpanch s mother, I made my way to the house of Babli, hoping to speak to her mother, Ompati. She was plainly hostile: she all but threw me out of her house, warning me never to come there again.
I was also unable to meet the men lodged in Ambala jail, convicted by the courts for the killings, mainly because no official wanted to take the risk of allowing me to meet them. The convicts, who had once been feted across the state for upholding community honour, are today living an ignominious life in jail. It is a sore point with community leaders, and officials are wary of doing anything that can upset the dominant caste. So my requests to officers in the chief minister s office and downwards, till the Ambala district administration, were politely ignored.
I did, however, get lucky with Gangaraj, a Congress worker, widely believed to be the mastermind behind the crime, who was convicted by the Karnal court but subsequently acquitted by the Punjab and Haryana High Court for want of sufficient evidence. He had just returned to Karoran after doing three years in jail, and once again I routed my request to meet him through the sarpanch. I was in luck. Gangaraj, who has refused to meet any journalist after being released from jail, agreed to meet me. But no tape recorders. I could have refused and said I am not at home. So don t record this conversation, he said to me. The man whose activities had held all of Haryana in thrall for almost two years told me that he has given up politics because the party had not stood by him. He was bitter and withdrawn. While researching Gangaraj, I chanced upon two videos taken by the local stringer of CNN-IBN, a national channel, which featured the man.
But my task was to reconstruct not just the killing of Manoj and Babli but also its impact in the Haryana countryside. For the first, I have relied on the prosecution s case in the Karnal sessions court. I procured court petitions, copies of first information reports (FIRs), testimonies of witnesses and more.
As for the second, which was to capture the pressures and persuasions taking place outside the courts, I gathered video recordings of events from local stringers and amateur documentary makers. Many of these video recordings had been broadcast on television channels when this crime was being intensively reported in the media. I discovered that intrepid local journalists had recorded important khap meetings in the villages, in which significant decisions about this and other cases were taken. These videos were invaluable in reconstructing meetings of khap panchayats, what was said there and the atmosphere that prevailed in these meetings, all of which helped me get a sense of the depth of passions at play in those months. Then there were hundreds of newspaper clippings, which covered every little development of the saga playing out in the countryside. These too I sourced from activists of the Janwadi Mahila Samiti (JMS), the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), and some from Seema and Narinder.
I also met and interviewed scores of other people connected with the case, many of who figure in the book. They gave freely of their time and I am deeply indebted to them. While the names of the main characters are all real, some of the other names have been changed. Almost all the events in the book are true, except the atmospherics employed in reconstructing the story.

This book would never have been completed without the help and insights given by Jagmati Sangwan, the walking encyclopedia on honour crimes in North India, and he