Stalking capital

Truth is darker than fiction. On September 21, the Capital’s crime news proved jolting even for a citizenry desensitised to routinely reported crimes against women. A 21-year-old woman from north Delhi had been stabbed 30 times during the morning rush-hour in the crowded Labour Chowk in Burari, less than a kilometre from her house. Bystanders merely recorded the entire incident on their phones. CCTV footage, circulated widely through WhatsApp, showed a lone person rushing to her defence before backing off in fear, even as the victim’s cousin Neha stood screaming for help. The accused, 35-year-old Surender Singh, was beaten up by the locals soon after and handed over to the police. The victim’s ordeal, however, was nowhere near ending, as she lay bleeding for long minutes until two autorickshaw drivers offered to move her to a hospital. A private hospital nearby refused to treat her and she was finally taken to Sushruta Trauma Centre in Civil Lines, where she was declared brought dead. Investigations showed that the accused had accosted her at the GTB Nagar metro station earlier that morning, on her way to the school where she taught. The station is used by many college students coming to North Campus Delhi University.

It soon became known that the victim had been stalked for the past year-and-a-half. It led to outrage from many quarters. The Delhi police has been asked to submit a report on the case to the Centre.

Burari is one of the bordering villages in Delhi NCR before the Capital gives way to Western Uttar Pradesh. Densely populated, it was recently brought into the municipality. Tiny lanes have one-room houses stacked atop one another. There is a stagnant pool bang in the middle of the colony.

It is easy to locate the house... everyone knows the one that belongs to ‘ woh ladki jiske saath haadsa hua tha ’ (the girl who was assaulted fatally). Her parents are home even though it is Friday noon. A tall bed occupies one corner, and the shelves above it contain a photograph of the parents taken right after their wedding. There are no photographs of the woman. One half of the room is taken up by a shrine housing images from the Hindu pantheon.

The parents are inconsolable. The father invites me in and begins speaking earnestly.

“We’re really angry at the NGO women who came to our house some months ago, when we had no clue that she was being stalked,” Narendar Kumar says. “Wasn’t it their duty to tell me what was happening to our daughter? Perhaps she was scared. It is possible that she didn’t want us to get worried. Wasn’t it their duty to inform us?” He has no idea which NGO it was.

The stalker was a former neighbour and it appeared to be a case of courting-gone-sour. Some newspapers reported that Singh had claimed he had been in a relationship with her for three years, until she ended it in 2015 after discovering he was married with kids. That is when he allegedly began to stalk her.

“We had told him to stay away from our daughter, after she complained to me about him,” her mother sobs. “We had told him since we were family friends, he could visit on Diwali and Holi, but should not attempt to speak to our daughter, and he had agreed.”

The family had even filed a police complaint in May after the stalking did not end. The family alleges that as Singh’s father was a retired sub-inspector, he managed to get the police bury the complaint.

“Our daughter was afraid to step out, she would hold on to my hand tightly and look around to see if she was being followed,” her mother recalls.

The parents restricted her movements to the school where she taught and her computer classes in the evening. She was constantly accompanied by a family member. On the day of the attack, the parents had gone to Agra to attend a funeral. “Our daughter had wanted to study nursing so she could help others. It is so difficult to bring up a child in the city if you’re as poor as we are,” the mother laments.

Barely a day after their daughter’s killing, a 32-year-old woman was stabbed to death by a stalker in Delhi’s Inderpuri area. The man had earlier been arrested on sexual harassment charges and was out on bail when he attacked the woman as she was returning from work at 8 pm.

A year ago, there was the bizarre case of an e-commerce employee stalked by a person obsessed with the movie Darr , in which Shah Rukh Khan plays a murderous stalker.

Delhi had the second highest number of stalking cases countrywide in 2015, accounting for 1,124 of the 6,266 registered cases, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. Worryingly, the number doubled from 541 in 2014 (the highest countrywide). The other States with a notorious record include Maharashtra (1,399 cases), Telangana (766), Andhra Pradesh (551) and Uttar Pradesh (519).

In 2013, stalking was made a criminal offence after the Parliament made amendments to the Indian Penal Code under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. It was originally an ordinance issued by President Pranab Mukherjee after the 2012 Delhi gang rape case.

One of the key observations of the Justice Verma Committee, set up to advise amendments to the IPC after the notorious Delhi gang rape of 2012, was the failure of governments and the police administration to control violence against women. Jagori, an NGO that works with women fighting stalking cases, sees no changes at all on the ground.

Chaitali (who prefers to go by her first name), a coordinator with the NGO, says the police too often hesitate to register a case of stalking. “They will say, you haven’t got physically hurt, have you? And in most cases, girls do not go ahead and register the cases themselves. Only the bold ones would take the step. However, the police in most cases is uncooperative in registering a case unless serious harm has been caused. It is inevitable that the complainant will not come back a second time to complain in such a scenario.”

Something similar happened in Burari too. A month after the family filed a police complaint, the stalker had kidnapped the woman at knifepoint from an examination centre, the father says. She was confined in a garage and the stalker had allegedly pierced her shins with a screwdriver, in a bid to intimidate her. He dropped her back at her house after warning of worse consequences if she went to the police again.

The parents now regret that they didn’t visit the police again. Instead, they had tried to talk sense into him by approaching his family and asking for a written assurance that he would leave their daughter alone. The father recalls Singh crying and pleading with him not to report the matter to the police. “I slapped him a few times, to teach him a lesson,” he says. Tragically for the family, they let the matter go and hoped for the best.

“Often, in cases of stalking, the victim has a lot to lose in terms of her quality of life. She is never comfortable ever again in the area where she is stalked. Often, girls who get stalked drop out of school or college, or their job, so their financial independence is sacrificised, resulting in financial pressures for the victim. There is always a hidden but intense psychological impact that cannot be ignored in such cases,” said Chaitali.

Jagori conducts safety audits where it invites elected representatives, different sections of the community and the police to come out and speak about their experiences, to identify specific problems that the women in that area face. “It is easier to get the police to participate in the event, but the elected representatives of the government rarely come forward in support,” says Chaitali.

Adding to the troubles is the fact that films in India have romanticised stalking repeatedly. Hindi films such as Darr , Tere Naam and, in recent times, Raanjhanaa end up glorifying stalking and misogyny. In Raanjhanaa , the victim is coerced to consent at knifepoint. The stalker, on the other hand, is made out to be a shining knight who is convinced there are two ways to attract a woman: pursue her till she agrees, or scare her into it.

While it’s debatable whether life imitates art or vice versa, popular culture and societal attitudes are clearly not on the side of women. As Chaitali puts it, “Whenever we meet in public and discuss the issue of stalking, it is rare to find a woman who hasn’t been stalked before, and yet few such cases get registered, even as verbal complaints. Mostly people approach us for advice rather than affirmative action.”

Supreme Court advocate Karuna Nundy blames it on a lack of awareness about victim protection. “In 2013, when the amendment was introduced to the Indian Penal Code based on the Verma committee’s suggestions and the Criminal Amendment Act, stalking was made a bailable offence, which I feel was a mistake. Witness protection, even though existent in Delhi, is barely seen in action. A backlash post a police complaint is very common in cases of stalking, so it is imperative that protection is present, yet the police is severely under-staffed.”

In a notice to Delhi’s commissioner of police, Swati Maliwal, chairperson, Delhi Commission for Women, said: “I met the mother and other family members of the girl. They have alleged that the girl had submitted a written complaint against the said accused at Burari police station in the first week of May. However, it is alleged that the police did not take any action against the culprit as the father of the man is a retired Delhi police officer... This inaction further emboldened the man to carry out the heinous act.”

The conviction rate in crimes against women is paltry. According to data provided by DCW, out of 31,000 cases registered between 2012 and 2015, there were only 146 convictions. With such a poor record, what hope can a victim seeking justice harbour at the end of the day?

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