One Billion rising for Soni Sori

As outrage over rape grows in the country the demand is often made for the government to take measures for safety. But what does one do when the state is party to heinous assaults on women?

"It is exactly this that we are setting out to address with the One Billion Rising For Soni Sori on the occasion of International Women's Day," says human rights activist Kamayani Mahabal. "While this is about Sori, it is also about several women prisoners and undertrials who the government finds inconvenient when free. Once labelled Maoists, terrorists or something equally convenient the system finds it easy to go after them."

Sori, the young adivasi teacher has been in police custody since October 2011 at the Raipur Central Jail. She was arrested in Delhi on October 4, 2011. She was brought to the Dantewada police station on October 8 after being charged of being a conduit between the Essar group and Maoists. Once taken into custody, she was allegedly raped at the Dantewada police station and tortured too with stones inserted into her vagina and rectum.

Adding insult to injury Dantewada Superintendent of Police Ankit Garg who she has named as responsible for the act, has been decorated with the President’s gallantry award on Republic Day this year.

He told DNA that the allegations made against him are all false. “Her Maoist mentors in Delhi and Mumbai are making her say all this. While she languishes in prison, they are using her to gain mileage,” he said.

Since the attack she has suffered several health complications due to the assault. Many activists who know her feel she will die if the courts do not give her bail soon.

In her many letters to Himanshu Kumar of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, Soni's complained of authorites ignoring her pleas for a doctor despite her condition.

In fact in a letter to the apex court in November 2012 she has asked, "Will giving me electric shocks, stripping me naked, shoving stones inside me solve the Naxal problem?"

While the clamour for justice has been growing since brutal gangrape and death of the 23-year-old medical student, Soni Sori's story does not find any place in the narrative of introspection and legislation against sexual violence.

Some activists like Ananda Pawar who has himself run afoul with the government's anti-naxal operations after highlighting police excesses in Gadchiroli laments, "In the cities demand for a collective stand against sexual violence is growing. But the same urban protestors have no qualms in calling regions where adivasis are fighting colonisation by urban India as 'Naxal-infested,' and rarely engage with what the adivasi caught between the Maoists and the government has to suffer. So when security personnel use sexual abuse to break down the Maoists there is rarely any opposition."

Unlike most other adivasis who give up fighting and fade into the dark, Sori has been outspoken while questioning human rights violations by police and security forces in the state. "The Chhattisgarh government wants adivasis to stop organising, agitating or protesting abuse of human rights. They want them to ignore the wanton robbing of resources by corporate entities in collusion with politicians," Himanshu Kumar, member of the Chhattisgarh chapter of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) has  said.

Though she has been called "a prisoner of conscience" by the Amnesty International in 2012 Chhattisgarh police insist she is a Maoist supporter in jail on charges of sedition.  In fact there was a massive turn-out at the protest outside the Indian High Commission in New york in October.

Sori's cousin Shankar Kunjam who DNA contacted through a local mediaperson said, "Every adivasi is forced to help Naxals food or shelter when demanded. If we don't they will kill us. How can the government use this against my cousin and call her Maoist? Especially after her father Mundra was shot by the same Maoists."

He feels the government wants her silent in prison. "If out, and given her courage to talk the truth, she can lead to a lot of red-faces in the police and bureaucracy.”

This is the reason why the government has kept her caught in several cases simultaneously. With both their father Anil Putane and mother Sori in jail and their grandfather attacked, this whole chain of events is taking its worst toll on Muskaan, 13 Deependra, 9, and Ashu, 6 - Sori's children.