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The joke doing the rounds in Sarawa is that the village has become “Peepli Live”. For about five days now, since the news of a Hindu girl being gang-raped and forcefully converted to Islam first broke, the village has seen a bevy of probing journalists, OB vans and sundry politicians flock to the scene of the crime.

“All that’s left is a giant-wheel to complete the mela,” says a man in uniform, wryly. He has been stationed in Sarawa by the state government to control wagging tongues and ensure things remain calm.

There’s no communal tension palpable in the village. However, there’s plenty of rumour-mongering.

The non-descript hamlet of Sarawa in the western Uttar Pradesh (UP) district of Meerut has a tiny population of approximately 5,000 people, which comprises Hindus, Muslims and Scheduled Castes. About 10 km off the Meerut-Hapur highway, the village is a postcard-perfect rural settlement, surrounded with lush-green sugarcane fields and mango orchards. There are about seven mosques and five temples and almost everyone you talk to takes pride in the fact that Hindus and Muslims live cheek by jowl in Sarawa.

Indeed, unlike many cities and towns of western UP, there’s no visible ghettoisation of Muslims here, and there’s no history of communal riots. The residents of Sarawa say vested interests would like to see the recent occurrence take a communal turn. However, they — both Hindus and Muslims — are determined to not let that happen.

Outrage and rumours

The news of the alleged gang-rape and forced conversion in Meerut has had social media outraged all of this week. #gangrapeinmeerut and #mediaonroza trended for two days straight. Vile gossip was circulated as facts. Some said the girl was being trafficked to Saudi Arabia, while newspapers went so far as to claim that the girl’s kidney had been removed.

It is strange that these claims emerged just hours after the first information report (FIR) was filed, given that it mentioned no such detail.

Despite all the claims and counter-claims, to the credit of its inhabitants, things have so far remained calm in Sarawa. “This is not a Hindu-Muslim issue and we will not let it become one,” says a Muslim resident. “If anyone has done anything wrong, let them be punished.”

Crime and conversion

On August 3, a Sunday, a 20-year-old girl from Sarawa village lodged an FIR in the Kharkhoda thana. (Sarawa comes under the Kharkhoda block.) Her family had previously filed a missing person’s report on July 31 in the same police station after the young girl had disappeared.

In the FIR, the girl claims that on July 23, the village pradhan (head) Nawab, one Sanaullah (known as hafiz), his wife Samar Jahan and Nishat, a friend of the girl, duped her into going to a madrasa in Hapur where Nawab raped her and got four other men to rape her. She then alleges that they forced her to convert to Islam.

The FIR is only a page long and does not go into details. It was written, not by the girl, but by a lawyer known to the family, says her uncle. This is perhaps why the girl’s statement in front of the magistrate and her family’s current version of events differ from the FIR.

The girl is currently in a hospital in Ghaziabad, recovering from exhaustion and a surgery gone wrong. Her father and sister remain with her most of the day, leaving her mother and uncle to take questions from the many scribes and local leaders who come visiting.

You can spot the house they live in from the crowd of policemen stationed right at the front gate. It’s an old, crumbling house with two cows tied at the entrance in the courtyard. When we reach the house at 8 in the morning we find that a team of scribes is already interviewing the uncle.

The girl’s mother, a frail woman in her forties, is lying on a bed in a dingy room at one end of the courtyard. She keeps repeating she does not know what has happened, and that she is scared. “They influenced my daughter with drugs and spells,” she says, crying.

A photographer from an English news daily enters the room and starts clicking her pictures; he zooms into her face to capture the tears trickling down her cheek.

The girl’s uncle, sitting on a chair in the courtyard, wears a harrowed look. It’s obvious that he has been narrating the incident ad nauseam to every visitor: “I have repeated this so many times.”

He goes on to give a detailed account of the entire episode. According to him, the girl was first raped by Nawab on June 29 but she kept quiet about the incident.

On July 23, she contacted her tormentors because she had been bleeding profusely for a week. (The four accused were known to the girl.) He claims the girl was then taken to Hapur madrasa by the accused and raped again. During this time, a surgery was also performed on her at a clinic in Muzaffarnagar.

The girl returned home on July 27 but did not mention the surgery or anything else for fear of her abductors. “They had told her that they would kill her family members if she opened her mouth,” says the uncle. He is unclear what the surgery was about, while the mother says it was to take out her uterus.

The girl’s uncle adds that the family did not file a missing report because the girl had been in touch with them all the while and had told them over the phone that she was with her friends. She did so, he says, on the orders of her abductors.

The girl again disappeared on the night of July 29. “She had complained of a stomach ache and left at night saying she wanted to buy medicine. She did not return that night and only came back on August 3. She was taken to Datoi, a nearby town, where they converted her and then took her to a madrasa in Muzaffarnagar where she was beaten and raped. But she finally escaped,” the uncle says.

The girl’s statement corroborates her uncle’s claims. She has accused Nawab, Sanaullah, his wife and Nishat for the crime. But she does not implicate Sanaullah as a rapist in the FIR or the statement. Yet Sanaullah has been dubbed the “mastermind” by many papers.

It’s still not clear why the surgery was conducted but medical reports have ascertained that none of her organs are missing. It has been reported that the surgery was to terminate an ectopic pregnancy, or tubal pregnancy, in which the embryo implants outside the uterus. A UP police official claims that the girl’s fallopian tube is missing.

However, in an impromptu press conference near the girl’s house, Zarina Usmani, Chairperson of UP State Women’s Commission, says that the test to ascertain the reason of the surgery is yet to be conducted.

The family’s claim about the surgery happening in Muzaffarnagar is being refuted by the police. In a fresh twist to the tale, the Superintendent of Police, Meerut, has claimed that the surgery happened in Meerut. “A boy called Kaleem who resides in the neighbouring village of Uldhan visited a lady doctor along with the girl. They then visited a doctor to terminate an abnormal pregnancy. This happened between the 23 and 27 July. We have all the supporting documents,” he claims.

The alleged perpetrators

So far, three of the main accused – Nishat, Nawab and Sanaullah’s wife – have been arrested. Nawab is the prime accused and also the village pradhan, elected about three years ago. This was the first time in about 30 years that a Muslim had been elected the village head. In stark contrast to the chaos and commotion at the girl’s house, Nawab’s residence bears a vacant look.

His younger brother Shakeel believes that the incident is a conspiracy to frame his brother. Shakeel refers to a dispute between Muslims and a particular Hindu caste about two years ago over an entry to a mosque. The Muslims wanted the entry to face the main road but members of the concerned caste objected. Nawab, as village pradhan, fought a case in the civil court and won. “He put a gate in front of the mosque’s entry facing the main road. That made the other party angry and they told my brother that they would teach him a lesson. The girl incidentally belongs to the same caste,” Shakeel says.

Nawab’s wife agrees. “One of the girl’s uncles was also trying to encroach on the land outside his house. Pradhan ji stopped him from doing so and this is how they are taking revenge on him,” she claims.

A little away from Nawab’s house is where Sanaullah lives. He is absconding and his wife is in jail. Sanaullah is known in the village as hafiz, a term used by Muslims for someone who has memorised the Quran. Almost all newspapers have misspelt his name and erroneously identified him as a cleric.

His brother Razaullah says, “The conversion took place but it was not forced. The girl, I hear, used to go to her friend Nishat’s place to learn about the Quran and she had expressed a desire to convert,” adding that he has never seen her. “I am a farmer, I work from morning to dusk. Who has the time to find out what the other is doing? These are just things I have heard,” he says, adding that Sanaullah’s biggest mistake is that he went into hiding.

Nishat, who is also in jail, was a good friend of the victim. They both studied together till Standard 12. Her older brother Asif says the two were friends till the victim went out of the village to study. “We didn’t want Nishat to go out since we wanted her to get married. She was told to stay home and learn things that would help her as a housewife,” he says. Asif says his sister should be punished if she has done anything wrong.

‘She had it coming’

As in all alleged cases of rape, in this one too, questions are being raised about the girl’s character. Divided as they may be on their religious practices, both Hindus and Muslims in the village are united in laying the blame at the girl’s door. Some of the girl’s Hindu neighbours wonder why she had to teach in a madrasa in the first place. (The girl was teaching English and Hindi at the madrasa in Sarawa until May.)

A bunch of neighbours from the girl’s community say that she was “too modern” and “roamed with boys”, while Asif, Nishat’s brother, says they did not approve of his sister’s friendship with the girl because “she roamed about with her hair cut.” Meanwhile, a daroga in a police chowki lives up to his cadre’s ways, stating, quite simply, that the girl was of “loose character” and had relationships with everyone.

Even her own uncle makes an apology for the fact that she earned her own money and that her parents did not keep a check on her. The narrative around the alleged gang-rape, in this case too, has been driven almost entirely by the girl and her “character”.

While most agree that a conversion did take place, there’s a debate in the village on whether it was wilful or forced. Some speculate that it might have started with the girl showing an interest in Islam but things may have gone out of hand after that. The girl in her statement and FIR has maintained that it was forced.

A reporter for an English daily who had interviewed the victim in the initial days of the story breaking says the girl had told her that she had forgotten how to do puja. “She said that she had come under their ‘influence’ and started to believe in Islam,” says the reporter, requesting anonymity. She had mentioned this in her report, but it was edited out by the paper.

Enter the rabble rousers

The case has all the ingredients to engineer the perfect communal flare-up and the opportunity is not lost on the local leaders. During our visit to the victim’s house, BJP leader Pandit Sunil Bharala and RSS leader Ajay Bhardwaj used language that did not help matters. “Kasai hain saare [they are all butchers],” said Bhardwaj. On the mention of the girl being taken to Muzaffarnagar, he added that Khalapar, an area in the city, is “poora Pakistan”. Both Bharala and Bharadwaj claimed they would gherao the police thana to seek justice: “We have to do something. How long will we take this?”

On the other hand, the other main players, the SP, BSP and Congress have maintained a studious silence on the issue. Mayawati, who was known for championing women’s rights during her reign as CM, has been lying low since she drew a blank in the Lok Sabha polls. Ditto for the Congress. The ruling SP, never known for its ability to check crime, finds itself on the backfoot in the aftermath of last year’s Muzaffarnagar conflagration.

In the charged climate that western UP has faced over the past few months, half-truths mix well with falsehoods to produce a noxious cocktail waiting to explode. Atal Bihari Vajpayee had famously sought a “national debate” on conversion, but his partymen, keen to milk this latest incident to their advantage, seem to have put the cart before the horse.

With so many versions of the story passing around, it is difficult to say exactly what happened to the victim until the whole truth emerges. In the meantime, with a compromised police and over-eager media providing background support, who knows what damage the political class will wreak?

Update: Sanaullah, one of the accused who was absconding, was arrested by the Meerut police yesterday. He is being questioned by the Meerut police on the case. The Superintendent of Police, Meerut, has claimed that Nawab and Sanaullah’s call records between 23 and 27 July can be traced to Sarawa village. “The girl had stated that she was taken to Hapur and Datoi in this period. Her call records though have been traced to Meerut,” he said.

Photo Credit: Kartik Nijhawan

This is an updated version of the original article