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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | ‘There was only one old woman left in the village. The others were all hiding in the hills’ by V Shoba

‘There was only one old woman left in the village. The others were all hiding in the hills’ by V Shoba

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published Published on Oct 4, 2011   modified Modified on Oct 4, 2011

A tiny road flanked by lush turmeric and maize fields veers off the state highway from Dharmapuri to Harur in Tamil Nadu towards Vachathi, a tribal village that has hungered for justice for nearly two decades after an irreparable tragedy destroyed its peace. Nineteen years ago, a large team of Tamil Nadu Police and officers from the forest and revenue departments swooped down on the village nestled in the foothills of the Sitheri hills in Harur taluk, Dharmapuri district, in an apparent search for smuggled sandalwood. Over the next two days, government officers raped and humiliated 18 tribal women, beat up dozens of other unarmed villagers, tore down homes and polluted drinking water sources with diesel and the carcasses of village goats they butchered for dinner.

In a sledgehammer of a verdict, a Tamil Nadu sessions court last week found all 269 officials—54 of them died over the years—accused in the incident guilty of having committed atrocities against villagers. It handed prison sentences to all 215—seven to 10 years to the 17 rapists and one-to-three years to the other offenders.

It’s a tenuous time for Vachathi, a hamlet of about 2,000 Malayalis, a Scheduled Tribe, that is struggling to exorcise the demons of its past while celebrating the victory of the present. In more ways than one, life in this agricultural village pivots around an outsize banyan tree overlooking a shrine of the goddess Mariamman. It was here, in the deceptive cool of its shade, that the people of Vachathi met their fate on a Saturday afternoon two decades ago.

“It was around 4 p.m. They came in jeeps and trucks and dragged everyone out—women who were plucking mangoes in the orchards behind the village, mothers who were cooking for their children, the old and the infirm. Most of the men had gone to work outside, so they escaped,” says Saala, a woman in her late 60s whose then-15-year-old son Vedachalam was dragged back to the village from the pastures where he was herding goats. “They broke his fingers,” she says, looking away.

There is a whispered back story to this tragedy. Sources close to the case reveal that a handful of villagers, unaware of the repercussions of illegal sandalwood trade, had carried timber on occasion to a neighbouring town in return for daily wages. When the authorities got wind of this and sent a search team to the village expecting to sniff out a sandalwood stash, the villagers offered resistance and, in an act of defiance, beat up an officer. This lead to a withering all-out raid on June 20, 1992, when 155 forest department officers, 108 policemen and six revenue officials entered Vachathi, a village of about 250 households. To the men of Vachathi, the events of that day 19 years ago are vanishing phantoms from the distant past; to the women, they are wounds that have festered and corroded the fabric of their lives.

***

A dirt path from the village leads down to a mostly-dried-up lake where over 80 women are employed in shovelling mud. They are preparing a smaller reservoir, fed by the lake, for the rains. The hot sun bears down on colourful saris and jasmine-laden braids as they wrap up the morning’s work to gather under a tamarind tree for a well-deserved meal of boiled rice, sambar and meagre portions of vegetables. Steel tiffin boxes tumble out of woven plastic baskets. A child wails for a hanging seedpod she cannot reach. A couple of kittens peek from under the folds of a cloth-swing. A silver-haired woman scoops up a handful of wild berries locally known as kelakkai from a knot in her sari and offers us a few. Another has drawn a dayakattai—a traditional dice game—board on the ground with a piece of chalk.

This cheery setting abruptly dissolves into an unsettling silence. In a flaming orange sari, Gandhimathi, the niece of the village headman, Perumal Goundar, is the first to speak. “I was unearthing sweet potatoes from our field when some forest personnel came up to me and said, ‘Come, let’s go to the village.’ When I refused, they beat me and dragged me by the hair to the banyan tree where the entire village had been rounded up. Women and children sat there bleeding and wailing. Then the officers picked 18 young girls from the crowd and loaded us in a lorry. ‘Show us the sandalwood,’ they said. We did not know what they were talking about. Then they took us to the lake and cruelly raped each of us, afterwards loading us back in the lorry as though we were animals,” says the 38-year-old mother of three, between wrenching sobs. Several other women burst into tears; some hug one another.

When the case was brought to the attention of the CBI—after the police refused to file an FIR—and trial began in the mid-’90s, Gandhimathi recounted in court every horror inflicted on the women; the men called them ‘whores’ and asked them to urinate in front of them; they took them to the Harur forest office the same night and asked them to beat their headman Perumal Goundar with a broom; they were forced to eat leftovers as the officers watched and then were threatened into silence during a cursory inspection by a magistrate at a jail in Salem.

“My younger sister, Selvi, was only 14 at the time. She was raped too. Luckily, all of us were able to lead relatively normal lives because we have a custom of marrying within the extended family,” Gandhimathi says, cradling her head in her hands.

The men of Vachathi ran for their lives that day, leaving their women behind. “They took off to the hills when they saw the trucks approaching. They did not care that we were at the mercy of these cruel men,” says Poongodi, a frail 35-year-old woman who says she is haunted by the rape and violence every day of her life.

“Two men dragged me out of my house as two others stood outside. They hit me with a bamboo cane and when I struggled, they hit me harder,” she says. Perumal Goundar says the mental torture and humiliation was the worst part. “I was stripped and beaten to pulp. I was kicked in the face and thrown into a Revenue Department jeep. But the demeaning treatment meted out to us at the Harur forest office was what twisted the knife in our wounds,” he says, pointing to scars running down his thin legs and launching into invective against the government machinery.

Over a hundred villagers, mostly women and over 25 children, spent almost two months in prison for alleged sandalwood smuggling. When they returned, the village was in ruins.

“They had wrecked all the houses and everything that was inside. There was no place to go, nothing to eat. They had butchered and sold all our goats and chickens—in fact, they roasted the goats and threw the skin and bones into the common well,” says Maarikkannu, another victim, sobbing into the loose end of her green sari.

Alone and adrift, the villagers sought shelter in the Sitheri forests, and returned only when the then MLA, M Annamalai, promised them food and protection. Says present MLA P Dilli Babu, “When we heard about the incident and went to the village a week later, there was only one old lady and two dogs left in the entire village. Those who were hiding in the hills were so damaged that they wouldn’t even trust NGOs.”

Local CPI(M) leaders first appealed to the High Court and then to the Supreme Court for a CBI inquiry that brought out the truth and brought to book all officers responsible for the tragedy, including top IFS officers M Harikrishnan, P Muthiah and L Nathan.

***

The tribals have since picked up the pieces of their lives and rebuilt Vachathi, right from the Mariamman temple that was allegedly looted during the raid to the 250-odd houses—most of them one-room structures with a metal sheet or thatched roof on top—that stand in neat lines today. In the dusty heat of the afternoon, men lounge on thinnais—shaded concrete platforms attached to the front of the house—and women busy themselves with stone-grinding batter for rice papad and weaving mats out of dried coconut palm leaves. Children with bright orange ribbons in their hair skip down the dirt road. At the government elementary residential school round the corner, S Chinnaswamy, one of three teachers, says there are 81 students this year. With many of them coming from neighbouring villages, the tiny classrooms double as bedrooms in the night.

A high school was built across the street from the primary school a couple of years ago—one of the first signs of change in what is still a very backward village. Santhi, a 22-year-old who works at the lake site, says girls in Vachathi want to study but drop out because there are no job opportunities for graduates.

“There are no factories nearby, and only two buses a day to Harur. The village doesn’t even have a hospital,” she says. Gandhimathi says there is increasing awareness about education. “My daughter says she won’t get married before she turns 21,” she says, picking a crimson flower from the hibiscus plant in front of her house—a whitewashed structure built during the Kamaraj era, which she and her husband rebuilt nearly two years after it was wrecked in the raid. Gandhimathi hands the flower to nine-month-old Vijay Anand, the son of Gomathi, a slim 23-year-old in a gold-bordered sari who, as a child 19 years ago, spent three months in jail along with her mother. “When our children grow up, they will look back on this judgment and ask us what it felt like,” she says.

With Vachathi’s plaintive cry answered, the villagers hope development, too, will come. Most homes in the village now have a small TV, courtesy the Tamil Nadu government. Yet, there are no toilets or LPG stoves.

“The labourers make only about Rs 150 per day. And those of us who own small plots of land can barely make ends meet,” says Jagannathan, who grows tomato, turmeric, broad beans and brinjal in a two-acre plot behind the disused village library. In a good year, Jagannathan and his wife Ilaveni earn Rs 20,000-25,000. “When our children finish school, we will not be able to pay for college education even though we want them to study,” he says.

The white-washed houses of Vachathi today seem to augur a brighter future. Babu, the twice-elected CPI(M) MLA from Harur, says the judgment is only the beginning.

“We want adequate compensation for those affected. There are several other tribal villages in this region where rape and plunder are a regular affair—we want to take up their cause,” he says.

The Case File

* On September 29, a trial court in Dharmapuri convicted 215 police, forest department and revenue officials who were accused of rioting and raping, assaulting and torturing tribals of a village abutting Sathyamangalam forest in 1992

* It was in 1995, nearly three years after the incident, that an FIR was finally filed following protests by Opposition parties and a petition filed by a CPM MP, based on which the Madras High Court directed the CBI to investigate the case

* The CBI probe revealed that the 269 government officials were guilty of the various crimes they were charged with and a chargesheet was filed in 1996

* The trial that began at the CBI court in Coimbatore was moved to a special court in Krishnagiri and finally shifted to the Dharmapuri sessions court

* Fifty-four of the accused died during the course of investigation and trial that began in 1995

* The court awarded 10 years rigorous imprisonment (RI) for committing atrocities against STs and seven years RI on charges of rape for 12 forest officials. Five other officials facing rape charge were awarded seven years of RI

The Indian Express, 2 October, 2011, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/there-was-only-one-old-woman-left-in-the-village.-the-others-were-all-hiding-in-the-hills/854395/


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