Dignity March: Raped and beaten, survivors of sexual abuse are walking from Mumbai to Delhi

Survivors of sexual abuse will be heading on foot, and some by car, to the national capital from Mumbai. They will be covering 200 districts in 24 states over 65 days, Yoshita Rao reports

Kiran Pawra does not know her own age. “I’m definitely over 20,” she guesstimates, adding, “In my community we don’t keep track of birthdays. Angootha chaap hai mein (I’m illiterate)”. But she vividly recalls all the gory details of the day she was abducted by her neighbours and the colour and make of the car in which she was trafficked across state borders. “It was a white jeep. Tata Safari,” she says, placing one hand to her head, sitting cross-legged on a plastic chair.

“There was a woman living three lanes from my house. Her name was Mangli and was a frequent visitor. One day when my parents were working in the field, she came over with Gorak and Bhaiya (relations undisclosed), who said they want to show me qilas (forts) in Jaisalmer. Meine itna door ka desh nahi dekha (I hadn’t seen such faraway lands),” she says.

 But by the next afternoon she was sold and married off to a resident of Amar Sagar, Jaisalmer. “Midway they stopped the car to beat me to within an inch of my life and threatened me. They said I was never going back and even broke my small mobile phone.”

Pawra is from the adivasi community of the town of Songir in Maharashtra. Till date she regrets not telling her parents before going away with her neighbours. “He used to take me to the forest and beat me. He’d ask, ‘Why do you want to go back? Do you not like me?’, I’d tell him I wanted to see my mom and dad only to get beaten again.”

“I realised that if I told him I liked him he would stop beating me and so I lied.”

Tired of being beaten every day, Pawra ran away one night through the forests. However, both her attempts to escape were unsuccessful. She was once caught by the border police and another time was jailed for a month in Jodhpur. “They put some case on me and I didn’t even understand why,” she laments.

“They accused her of robbing and so we put a counter case against them,” says 34-year-old Kranti, a volunteer at Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan (RGA) since 2002. “There was an article in a [regional] newspaper about Kiran [Pawra] and that is when Garima Abhiyan stepped in to know her story,” she adds.

Like Pawra, there are millions in India who are survivors of sexual abuse. Yet the ideology in India is to first point fingers at the victim. The RGA has set out to change this ideology by marching 10,000 km to the nation’s capital. “Around five years ago, I led a protest against female manual scavengers that covered a similar distance. And after the protest the government changed the law. We are not looking to change any law but to change the Indian mentality and end sexual violence,” begins Ashif Shaikh. A major objective of the march he says is, “to get support instead of shamed. We want to break the culture of silence.”

Starting with an eager 5,000 survivors from Sion, Mumbai on December 20, RGA expects to pick up at least 1,000 from each of the 24 districts that they will be passing. The protest is expected to culminate on February 22 of next year. “We have planned around 150-200 sessions on sexual abuse and supporting the victim along the way,” Shaikh says.

Among the speakers are Bhanwari Devi, who was gangraped by her high-caste neighbours in 1992 but is still fighting for justice. The Bollywood film Bawandar is a 2000 film based on Devi’s story.

As she readies to embark on the march tomorrow, Pawra worries for her now one-year old son, Nilesh, who is still breastfed. She recalls, it’s been two years that she escaped from her captive’s clutches in Jaisalmer. “These men [perpetrators] are still roaming free. I am in perpetual fear of them,” Pawra says, elaborating that the only thing she wants from this protest is justice.