Walayar Dalit sisters rape and murder case: I don’t trust police or political parties anymore, says mother of victims

WALAYAR, PALAKKAD: She has developed an indifference towards life after seeing her two minor daughters being sexually assaulted first and found them hanging in their hut near Walayar later.

For the last three years, the Dalit woman has been to the court several times and deposing, strongly believing that her words were not falling on deaf ears. But her worst fears came true last Friday as the three accused, allegedly supporters of the ruling CPM, were let off by a Pocso court. She now fears for the life of her 10-year-old son, her lone hope.

“I don’t trust the police or political parties anymore. I want a reinvestigation by a court-monitored independent agency,” the mother of the Dalit girls told TNIE as calls for a fresh probe became louder in the state.

The elder girl, 13, and younger, 9, were found hanging in a similar manner on January 13 and March 4, 2017, respectively. Autopsy had revealed the two were sexually assaulted. 

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“In the past three years, I had gone to the court and deposed many a time. The special public prosecutor didn’t give any guidance. She told me ‘You just state what you saw in your house’. She knew very well that neither my husband nor I could read or write,” she said.

The mother added she had told the court that she witnessed the accused assaulting her children sexually.
“We had seen the accused, V Madhu, son of my father’s younger brother, and M Madhu, son of my sister, sexually assaulting my children. We stated this fact in court. We told them not to enter the house. But they kept coming when we used to go for work. At that time, the two children had only grandmother in company at home.

The mother said: “Six months before the elder girl was found dead, V Madhu came to my house one day. As there was no space, he slept out in the open. After midnight, he pushed open the door of our makeshift house and came inside. But he accidentally stepped on the vessels and we all woke up hearing the sound. I slapped him and asked him why he entered the house. I had narrated this incident too at the court.”

She said though political leaders and civil rights groups are offering support and asking her to stage dharna in front of the SP office and elsewhere, she refused.

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“Many of the accused belonged to the ruling party. When I had told the police that I had seen one of the accused assaulting my daughter, he was taken to the Walayar police station. But he was let off soon after the ruling party’s members intervened, I was told,” the mother said.

“Had the case been investigated properly based on our elder daughter’s postmortem report, which wasn’t shown to me, we wouldn’t have lost our second girl. “I had told it in the court, but during cross-examination, the counsel of the accused threatened me that I would also be made an accused,” she said, adding the police had brought outsiders as witnesses and the motive behind it was unknown.

The girls’ father has strong reasons to believe why they were murdered. “I had seen my younger girl’s body and it appeared to me that someone had strangled her and hung her up as she had told the police that she had seen two masked persons coming out of the hut at the time of her elder sister’s death. Moreover, it was she who had seen the body of her sister first and cried out and alerted others,” the father said.

CPM Pudussery area secretary Subash Chandra Bose, however, said the party cadre had no role in the incidents which led to the girls’ death. “We hadn’t intervened at any stage during the investigation either,” he added.