'Kahaan hai azadi'?: Anu Mukherjee, acid attack victim

Anu Mukherjee, acid attack victim, 33

“Where is ‘freedom’? If every time you step outside, you are afraid of what people will say, who will brush against you, who will throw things at you — then kahaan hai azadi?’ Anu Mukherjee could well have been speaking for every woman, but her anguish is a more personal.

The last nine years of Anu’s life, ever since the brother of a woman she worked with at a dance bar threw acid on her face, have been a nightmare. The acid burnt her face and, worse, her eyes.

It has deprived her of every kind of freedom. She’s without an income of her own and so dependent on her 22-year-old brother. These days, she says, she only ever travels out to meet her lawyers, mediapersons, or to church. ‘Even when I cover my face, people ask ‘what happened?’.” 

The Rs19 lakh expenditure from her nine operations to reconstruct her face and eyes, she says, came from her own savings. Another 10 are required she says, but she doesn’t know where to get the money for these. She’s appealed to politicians such as Sonia Gandhi, Kiran Walia and even Arvind Kejriwal, but nothing has come of it. ‘What is the use of being an independent country when it cannot even help a woman who has lost everything for no fault of hers?’ Her only hope now, she says, is Kaun Banega Crorepati, the programme on which another acid-attack victim won Rs25 lakh.