On a hot and quiet afternoon, a woman lies on a wooden charpoy under a squeaking slow-moving fan inside her mud-walled house.
“I have not been this happy in the past 10 years,” she says. It is days after a court in Muzaffarnagar found two Hindu men guilty of gang-raping her and holding a gun to her baby son’s head. A third man died before the case came to court.
Maheshvir, known by only one name, and Sikander Malik were sentenced to 20 years in the first conviction for one of the gang-rapes which occurred during communal riots that left more than 60 people dead and hundreds homeless.
Amena* was 26 when the violence swept through the Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts of Uttar Pradesh – India’s most populous state – in September 2013.
A decade on, she was the last of seven women to still be pursuing justice for a rape reported to police at the time. The others withdrew their complaints in the face of years of intimidation.
The convictions in May are being welcomed by Muslims facing increasing discrimination under the populist rightwing prime minister Narendra Modi.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) is in power in Uttar Pradesh and is pushing a Hindu nationalist agenda it calls Hindutva. In a political climate where religious minorities feel persecuted, a Muslim woman’s battle for justice has caught the popular imagination.
The violence was triggered by rumours that a Muslim boy had sexually abused a Hindu girl in Kawal village. The boy was killed by a gang of Hindu men, which allegedly provoked an angry Muslim mob to take revenge.
The riot spread across western Uttar Pradesh. When Amena heard chants of “Kaato Musalmano ko” (slaughter the Muslims) in her village in Samli district, she took her three-month-old son and, like her Muslim neighbours, ran.
But as she hid in a sugarcane field, three Hindu men found her. The men were local and known to her husband, she says.
“That day everybody ran for their lives, so did I. But as soon as they got hold of me, they snatched my child away and put a gun at his temple threatening to kill him, and then they raped me,” says Amena. The events of that day and faces of the rapists have not faded from her memory, she says.
Amena told her husband about the attack and the couple initially decided to keep quiet, fearing the shame often associated with rape. But then stories of sexual assault against women started emerging from the displacement camps where many people, including Amena and her family, took refuge after the riots.
Hearing that six Muslim women from another village had found the courage to formally lodge rape complaints, Amena decided to send her own written account of what had happened to her to police in Muzaffarnagar. That was in October 2013.
It took four months and the intervention of India’s supreme court to get her case filed. A charge sheet against the accused took another four years to process. It took a further three years, until November 2021, for the police to interview seven prosecution witnesses.
Meanwhile, the three accused were released on bail in 2014 and their lawyers were granted 18 adjournments by the Allahabad (known as Prayagraj since 2018) high court.
Proceedings were then suspended when Amena filed a petition in the same court pleading for the trial to be transferred out of Muzaffarnagar because of the threats and harassment she and her family were enduring. The Covid pandemic caused further delays.
“We had no hope that the verdict would be announced before another 10, 15 years,” Amena’s husband, Rehman*, says.
An Amnesty International report on the cases noted that all the women, along with their families, went through years of harassment and threats from the accused and their families before the six withdrew.
“There is a running joke that the whole world is on one side and Muzaffarnagar court is on the other,” says Rehman.
Amena appealed again to the supreme court on 8 February this year for the case to be heard, and she finally saw her attackers stand trial in April.
“I had no idea whether it was day or night during the whole process,” says Amena. “We used to leave for the court early in the morning and come back home late at night only to find our children sleeping, sometimes even without eating anything.”
As well as the rape conviction, the men received two-year sentences for criminal intimidation and fines of 10,000 rupees (£98) each.
Amena, who has three children, says she doesn’t want them to know anything about her past. “I just hope they study well and do good things in life.” But she’s worried the financial hardships the family has endured over the past decade “are hampering my children’s education”. Her eldest has had to drop out of school at 14. “I feel bad every day that I am not able to send him to school.”
She is still trying to deal with the trauma left by the attack and the pressure she was under to reach a faisala (compromise) during the legal process.
Already forced to move three times, the family think they may have to move again because the attackers and their relatives know where they live. “That’s why I want to go somewhere far away and start afresh.”
But, she adds: “I was adamant to fight my case until the last breath. Now I am happy, but I feel exhausted.”
* Names have been changed
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
