A Village, Charred

Bhatan Khera is struggling to come to terms with the horrific attack on a rape victim.

- Puja Awasthi

Her name was a syn-onym for seductive beauty. That is how they remember her in the hamlet of Bhatan Khera, where she lived. But on the morning of December 5, as she ran shouting “Bachao, Bachao!” (save me, save me), Ravindra Prakash Jaiswal, who was out to tend to his buffaloes, thought a chudail (witch) was coming his way. Jaiswal’s immediate reaction was to pick up a wooden rod to shoo her away.

“I had never seen anything like that in my life,” he said. “The skin on her left thigh and right arm was falling off. There were no clothes on her though she wore socks and shoes. There was a bag on her shoulder. She showed me a charred mobile and asked for a phone to call the police.” Jaiswal owns a provision store on the road that leads out of the village of Hindu Nagar, in which Bhatan Khera is a hamlet. The charred woman then dialled 100. She asked for water but Jaiswal refused, believing it would worsen her condition. After the phone call, she ran away from the shop.

The “chudail” was a 23-year-old. In a statement she gave the medical officer in charge of the Sumerpur Primary Health Centre at 5:35am, where she was taken for immediate medical attention, she said that she had been on her way to catch a train to Lalganj at the Bainswara train halt when she was accosted by five men—Harishanker Trivedi, Ram Kishore Trivedi, Shubham Trivedi, Shivam Trivedi and Umesh Bajpai. They held her hands and legs and put a knife to her neck before pouring petrol over her and setting her on fire. “On December 12, 2018, Shubham Trivedi and Shivam Trivedi had raped me and a case was registered at the Lalganj thana [police station]. I was going to Rae Bareli for that case,” reads the statement. The victim’s medical report reads, “90 per cent burns... no other injury”.