State of apathy

With promises made to Nirbhaya’s family unkept, her ancestral village lies neglected

- PUJA AWASTHI/Ballia

There was a little girl who dreamt of flying to faraway lands and taking her parents along once she grew up. “In her own way, she fulfilled that promise. They took her to Singapore to be treated and came back with her dead body,” says Suresh Kumar Singh, 52, uncle of the 23-year old physiotherapy intern who was gang-raped on the night of December 16, 2012, in Delhi.

Suresh is the youngest of four brothers; the intern’s father, Badrinath, is the third one. Suresh is the only one who stayed back in the family’s ancestral village of Merwara Kala in Uttar Pradesh’s Ballia district that borders Bihar, and tends to the five acres that the brothers share. Suresh says Badrinath was adamant that his three children would study as much as they wanted. “He worked overtime in his job as a loader,” he says. So careful was the intern’s family with money that in the aftermath of the gang-rape, though desperate for the comfort, they did not ask their relatives from the village to come to Delhi. Suresh says he went nevertheless, armed with a sack of rice and dal so that his brother’s family would not be burdened.

In the immediate aftermath of the gang-rape, a nation’s collective conscience was so shaken by the brutality of the act that it revisited its laws on rape and juvenile justice. International media descended on the village. “At 4am, when we would rise to perform tilanjali (an offering of sesame seeds in water) to a peepal (sacred fig) tree near our home, an Australian television crew would come to film us,” says Suresh. “They did so every day till the 13th day. Politicians of all hues came to the village.”