A Tulsi Plant, Unworn Sandals, A Mat, Brooms…Hathras Memories In A Post-Truth World

NOTE: This story was first published in Sep 2021. In the wake of the Hathras gangrape and murder verdict, Outlook is revisiting its coverage of Hathras tragedy, complex caste dynamics of gender violence and the erasure of evidence as truth.

This has happened before, this will happen again
What does that fire remember? The screams of satis
dragged to their husband’s pyres and brides burnt alive;
the wails of caste-crossed lovers put to death,
the tongue-chopped shrieking of raped women.
This has happened before, this will happen again.

—From Meena Kandaswamy’s poem
Trigger Warning: Description of Violence, Rape

I remember the red and beige sandals with butterflies printed on them. A big butterfly in flight and smaller ones trailing it. An imi­­­ta­tion pearl stuck on each strap. A canvas almost. It could be a red sky dotted with inn­ocent ambitions of the butterflies. I have since then looked for the meaning of red sky. It’s said a red sky in the morning is a warning of stormy weather. She was fatally raped on one such morning. Among all that remains of her is that pair of plastic sandals. Unworn. Her brother had bought it for her for Diwali.

The body of the 19-year-old Dalit girl from the Valmiki community, gang-raped allegedly by upper caste men on September 14, was cremated in the early hours by the police, perhaps to erase the evidence of the crime. But the memory stands in the way. The sandals are a reminder. So is the basil sapling that the girl had planted. So are the ashes, her remains, handed over to the family. And so is my notebook.

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I wrote then that everything else that happened in the Hathras gang rape case was “a clash of selective truths, perceptions, myths, beliefs as it happens in a post-truth world”. I had written down the memories as evidence. The mother of the girl had told me she plaited her daughter’s long hair after the clutch that held it broke when she was allegedly dragged through the fields. “She asked me to tie her disheveled hair,” the mother had said.

Hathras as a crime scene where a Dalit girl was brutally and fatally raped, was a post-truth world. The only antidote to it is individual memory. Memory has its own politics. It is personal, with all this ephemera and physical and nonphysical remains like the unworn sandals, the act of braiding the daughter’s hair and the poem. I have read it many times since then. In a way, poetry has always been post-truth. It prioritises emotional subjectivity over objectivity. It is not an attempt at being aesthetic. The poem is the truth that resonates within a political consciousness.

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Carolyn Forche in her 1993 anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, establishes the importance of poetics of witness. Tragedy’s after-image is secured within the poem. This is an attempt against forgetting. We must remember the tragedy. A young girl’s life cut short, the historical oppression manifest in her rape and death, the foreboding that is such a possible future, such a continuum, the psychic toll of indescribable suffering.

Truth is always disorienting. Forche arrives at the power of a fact through poetry. In Kandasamy’s poem, the violence is made fresh again in a destabilised world. In the post-truth world where collective memory is reorganised and repackaged, individual memory is like a lone boat on a storm-tossed sea.

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In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as the “Word of the Year”, saying it is “a term relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. The “post-truth” phenomenon is gaining prominence in a state where truth is changing and falsehood is gaining respect. In her 1967 article Truth and Politics, philosopher Hannah Arendt said lies are necessary and justifiable tools of politicians.

In the Hathras case, lines are blurred between fact and opinion and interpretations. Mass media has empowered this confusion. There isn’t a den­ial of the existence of truth but there is an intentional subjugation of facts where some truths are preferred over another because these concur with personal perspectives. An interview of some girls living in the village on a popular television network had stressed that they feel safe in Bulgarhi. But over 80 per cent of its population consists of Thakurs. That fact was overlooked.

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There is a poem, a few images and a notebook in a conundrum of voices that want us to forget the rape and death and instead believe that the girl was killed by her own family for money. When I reached Hathras to report the gang rape-murder case last year, it was already a disappearing and fading scene of crime. I remember the millet fields. She had been dragged in one of those fields. The girl’s body had been cremated by the police, allegedly without the family’s approval, in the fie­lds in Bulgarhi village. Four Thakur men from the village were arrested. These were the facts.

Grand narratives were at work here and everything had moved beyond the framework of truth. The body of the girl was the site of crime and they had already burnt it. After two weeks of fighting for her life in the hospital, the girl died on the morning on September 29.

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On September 14, after the mother found the girl barely alive and bleeding in the fields, she had covered her naked body with the pallu of her sari. The victim was rushed her to Chandpa police station. An FIR was lodged against Sandeep, a Thakur, for attempt to murder, as well as under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act. The family hadn’t mentioned sexual assault at that time because they did not want their daughter to be stigmatised. They wanted her to get married, they said.

But the girl made a dying declaration. She named four accused. The last names of the accused were not mentioned in the media reports. There were a lot of men on that day with microphones and cameras. Two male reporters from a local newspaper told me that the truth was that “the girl was having an affair with one of the acc­used”. There was a feud between the families. This was repeated several times that day. There was also the “honour killing” angle. They said the girl was “having an affair, her brother caught them and beat her up”. They added that he didn’t want to kill. “Or maybe, he killed her for money or for honour’s sake.”

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In this post-truth place, I was a reporter who was also a woman. There was public suspicion about medical “facts” and the grief of the family. A day after the police let Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra meet the victim’s family, journalists were let inside the village in a damage-control exercise. I remember walking to the village on October 4. The cars were to be parked on the highway.

By then, the panchayats in nearby villages had started to demand justice for the Thakurs. They said they had been wrongly accused. But there was a dying declaration. I remember the girl’s neck had been broken. The family of the girl said they had seen her tongue gorging out when they found her in the fields.

I remember meeting a man called Narsingh. He said he was a Thakur from the neighbouring village. “The truth is that the girl had an affair with the accused,” he said. Every two metres, a live rep­ort was being aired. The fight for TRP can subvert any truth, ignore all evidence, dismiss all memories. Everyone offered their own version of truth. One local reporter had filed a report on a feud over a plot of land and the FIR filed by the victim’s family under the SC/ST Act against the Thakur family about 15 years ago. He offered to send me those documents.

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At the house of the accused, a woman said the victim’s brother’s name was also Sandeep. “Our brother-in-law’s name is also Sandeep. Who did she mean?” she asked, referring to the girl’s dying declaration. The principle of “Leterm Mortem”, which means “words said before death”, is called the “dying declaration”. It is considered an exception to the hearsay rule.

A police officer told me if they hadn’t cremated the body, the villages would have been set on fire. “You don’t understand the caste equations here,” he said. Some even said the family hadn’t been grieving enough. Some reporters and photographers said it didn’t look like they had lost their daughter. There was a template for grief.

The family didn’t cook on October 4. I remember that. There were too many bytes to give. The village, the house, the fields transformed into a giant studio, a circus. News and truth are not the same thing anymore. Conspiracy theorists thrive. A distant relative sitting at the victim’s house asked me: “Tell me, if you love someone, would you ask them to rape you?”

I remember seeing the younger brother in the house. He told me he had got the girl a red jacket and boots for winter last year. I remember a pair of earrings she had bought to wear on Diwali. There was this blue gown her sister-in-law had got her for the wedding in the family last year. All this absence and presence. She had stitched a mat once and made three brooms. They were lying in the front yard. The mother told me about the girl’s habit of suckling her thumb, her thing for twisting her eyebrows.

On October 6, I went back. The family had decided to fight for justice. The media was no longer omnipresent. They had moved on to another story. I returned with a photo of the plastic sandals with the price tag attached to it. The one with the butterflies. There is a poem as an epitaph. There’s a notebook. There’s no need to contextualise Hathras. It is a standalone story. A warning, a trigger, a tragedy. We don’t have to justify why we must remember the story. It is enough that we stand against forgetting. That’s one antidote to post-truth politics.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Individual Memory In A Ppost-Truth World")