A commentary on the victim rights based judgment of Hon’ble Justice P. Velmurugan, Judge, Hon’ble Madras High Court dated 29.09.2023 in L. Nadhan v. State rep by DSP, and other allied appeals preferred by the (alive) rapists against the conviction and sentence granted by the Special Court for SC & ST Cases, Dharmapuri dated 29.09.2011.
Trigger Warning : Disturbing details ahead, including details about sexual violence.
The Hon’ble Madras High Court rendered justice to 18 survivors of rape on 29.09.2023. Many media outlets were concerned about a mere coincidence of dates of both the judgments (appeal and trial) bearing the date September 29th and wrote “the number 29 and vachathi” alleging that a silly and frivolous detail as of a date bears a weight on an crucial case like that of Vachathi sexual assault. Well, one can ask what is to be expected from Tamil media outlets which telecast live coverage of a minor girl’s funeral?
17 women and 1 minor girl aged 13 years were raped by unifomed men from Forest, Revenue and Police Departments, who were among the 269 men convicted under various offences including rape and offences under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Attrocities) Act, 1989. All the victims belong to the Scheduled Tribes community. The horrific set of incidents including violent sexual assault happened on an evening of June 20, 1992. However, it took 3 years and an order from the Hon'ble Madras High Court in the year 1995 for the Central Bureau of Investigation to initiate investigation and no police complaint was taken on record until the CBI was forced to intervene. More horrific details unfold while perusing the judgment of Justice A Hadi of the Hon'ble Madras High Court dated February 24, 1995 who directed the CBI to investigate - horrific details regarding how Revenue, Police and Forest departments, to save their own kin, buried all the evidences including repeated complaints filed by the victims of Vachathi sexual assault. From the perusal of the above said judgment dated February, 1995, it can be seen that the first record of complaint was given by the victims 15 days after the horrific ordeal at the Vachathi village. However, until the Hon'ble Madras High Court passed directions to the CBI, the state of Tamil Nadu did not acknowledge the disaster that occured on the evening of June 20, 1992 and the corresponding incidents happened thereafter.
The version of the uniformed rapists is that they had recieved information regarding illicit smuggling of sandalwood in the foothills of Hasur hills where the Vachathi village is located in the Dharmapuri district. The rapists, consisting of 269 men, from Forest, Revenue and Police departments planned a raid party at the Vachathi village between 5 PM and 6 PM on June 20, 1992, to curb the alleged smuggling of sandalwood in the tribal village. During their raid, the uniformed officers brutally attacked the villagers, vandalized their properties, sexually assaulted the women and minor children, destroyed the ration cards & certificates of the villagers and then arrested them. The police, in the guise of conducting the raid party, vandalised the Vachathi village in toto. According to their own admission, between 20th and 21st June, 1992, the police arrested 181 persons belonging to the Vachathi village among which 97 were women. There surfaces various testimonies of women who were raped at the Harur Forest Office after they were arrested and taken away from their village.
In fact, the judgment of Justice A Hadi finds the Sub Inspector of Police, Harur in error for refusing to take the victims' complaints and for asking them to complain to the Executive Magistrate instead. Justice A Hadi concluded that the police department tried to burke the investigation of 18 sexual assault complaints. The victims got stuck in a vicious cycle of repeated attacks by the sovernment servants, who unleashed their power over a tribal village on the foothills of Hasur, and violated their properties, livelihood and their bodily autonomy. Reiterated in the judgment of Justice P.Velmuragan, the victims were inside their houses, cooking, and some working in the agricultural fields, when the uniformed officers dragged them by their hair and restrained them to stand under the Banyan tree near the Vachathi lake. The uniformed officers picked the victims and assaulted them sexually on the barren lakebed, under the tree and in the bushes nearby. One can find videos of the victims in the present day, still shaking and crying from their non-erasable trauma, describing their ordeal in detail. The women can be found saying that their dresses were torn or thrown but the officers forced them to get in a lorry to take them to the Hasur Forest Office, where they were kept in custody until the next day.
Not stopping there, the uniformed officers once again visited the Vachathi village when almost the entire village population was in the police custody, vandalised the village once again, killed their cattles, cooked and ate them, apart from taking away precious belongings of the villagers. Justice P. Velmurugan upheld the conviction of all 269 men, alive or dead. The horrific nature of this case can be seen from the fact that the rapists arrested the victims and their family members and kept them in their custody until they were awarded bail. Even after that, when the victims tried to file complaints against the uniformed officials of the institution, other officials protected their own brotherd and buried the complaints.
Justice P. Velmurugan painstakingly notes in his judgment, the status of affairs, wherein he finds that an ex MLA's repeated complaints which succeeded through the 1995 Writ Petition and the then Executive Secretary of All Women Association whose enquiry report was sent to the National Commission of SC/ ST and yet no action was taken, however, the rapists, who were in power wearing uniforms, filed a number of cases against the innocent victims and their families. He further notes that no actual complaint was registered against the sandalwood smugglers, the purported suspects of the supposed raid party.
The argument of the rape convicts was that the witnesses and victims failed to identify the convicts during the Test Identification Parade and on that reason, the conviction should be overturned. Answering and countering the defence of the convicts, the learned Judge narrates the report given by the then Magistrate who recorded that him and the witnesses felt unsafe during the Test Identification Parade due to the behaviour of the uniformed officials / accused and thus, he could not complete the parade. The learned judge uses this report to dismiss the argument of the accused that if this was the amount of pressure faced by a judicial officer, one cannot fathom the amount of criminal intimidation faced by the victims, who were jailed for nearly a month. The learned judge further says that the victims felt safe and protected only during the trial which led them to identify the accused. The learned Judge further notes that this is not an ordinary case because of the extreme power difference between uniformed government servants and vulnerable tribal coolie workers. The learned Judge further notes that the victims, during their custody, were threatened not to reveal about the sexual assault, failing which they were told that they will be killed.
Dismissing the arguments of the accused that all the 18 victims filed "false sexual assault complaints" against the 3 department officials only because the officials booked them for smuggling sandalwood, the learned Judge calls their argument "unacceptable" as there is a deposition of a 8 month pregnant lady who was brutally attacked and raped by the uniformed officials. He also discussed about one of the witnesses' depositions, who is a woman constable, wherein she had narrated that all the victims were remanded at midnight 12 AM and that the victims, going through a collective and continuing trauma, did not talk to anyone for a week during custody. He further held that the common intention of the rapists, who in this case were uniformed officials, was not to find illicit sandalwood smugglers but rather, sexually assaulting the tribal women and children of Vachathi.
The learned Judge directed the State Government to pay compensation to the victims, and if they were no longer alive,, to pay compensation to their legal heirs. He ordered that 50% of the compensation should be paid by the convicts.
He further directed the State to provide employment opportunities to the victims and their families, whose houses and properties including their certificates were destroyed by the uniformed men. Other than these directions, the Judge also has asked the State to take welfare measures for the Vachathi village which was destroyed after this incident and report the same to the Court.
This judgment of the Hon'ble Madras High Court has rendered justice to the 2 decade trauma undergone by the victims of Vachathi village, especially by awarding compensation to the victims and their families, along with upholding the conviction ordered by the Sessions Court. However, this does not end here until the convicts exhaust all of their legal resources available. The victim rights focused judgments are rare in this legal climate, where the High Courts of this nation - quashes complaints under Protection of Children From Sexual Offences Act, 2012, because the minor victim married the accused; commutes the sentence of the conbicts because the rape was not "brutal and extensive"; accidentally reveal the victim's identity. More often than not, the judges are desensitised towards the plight of the women and victims of sexual trauma, and unfortunately it reflects on the orders they write and sign.
The trauma undergone by the women of Vachathi will run through their generations and this judgment sets a right path towards the healing of Vachathi.
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