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A bureaucrat remembers his first brush with a dowry death as a young man sent to investigate a case
My first brush with dowry was not when it was offered to me; it wasn’t when I had refused it- I had taken all this in my stride. It was something much more; it was ghoulish, it was savage and feral. I was just about 25, a young Sub Divisional Magistrate lording over my jurisdiction and getting used to being an executive magistrate.
That night is etched in my soul. It was nearing midnight, the skies had opened up and it was raining cats and dogs. I had just received a call from my boss, the District Magistrate, asking me to head for the local burial ground where a body had to be exhumed, and it had to be exhumed immediately and sent for an autopsy. I was not to send any other magistrate, I was to go myself. The body in question was of a young Muslim girl who had been killed for dowry, and the body had been buried on the sly.
I had learnt about exhumations, about dying declarations, and about so much more to do with death during my training, and I was now called upon to do what was part of my duty. My driver and bodyguard were summoned, and we proceeded to the burial ground in pitch darkness and pelting rain. The police had already been asked to make the necessary arrangements, and when I reached the burial ground, flood lights with a generator had been set up, and the digging had begun.
I was scared, and with each shovelful of earth my heart was in my mouth. The doms who were doing the digging were drunk- I learnt that whenever they had to perform a task like this, they first drank themselves silly, and I don’t blame them. We were drenched to the core and the rain showed no signs of letting up.
And then my world stood still, I gagged, and I watched- a decomposed body was pulled out from that sodden hole in the ground- a body which was human till the other day. She must have had her moments of joy and of sorrow, she must have laughed and cried, she must have sang and danced, she must have studied, she must have…I checked myself then; I was getting lost in a life now so brutally extinguished. I wanted to weep, but I was the local magistrate.
I had to get back and write out my report, so I had to study the prima facie cause of death- she had been hit with a blunt weapon on the base of her neck from behind, breaking the upper spine neatly. On my direction, the doms held her head and let it fall, indicating that the bone and the cartilage in the neck had been broken, and that her head was hanging free.
Everything lost meaning at that moment- my life, my education, my values, my whole existence. All my training vanished into thin air. I stood frozen in that graveyard, and then I wept, my tears washed away by the rain.
My God died that night. He died young.
This death, this night without end would merit a line or two in the next day’s SITREP (Situation Report), which would then slowly wind its way up to a statistician in the National Crime Records Bureau. It would finally become a statistic under the heading ‘Crime against Women’, sub-heading ‘Dowry Deaths’.
Pic credit: United Nations Photos (Used under a Creative commons license)
I am a former bureaucrat, and have worked a lot on gender issues, disaster management and good governance. I am also the proud father of two lovely daughters. read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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