By Maya Palit
Two women from Narayanpur, Chhattisgarh were detained overnight by unit C-60 commandos in Gadchiroli on January 21st who suspected them of being Maoist sympathisers. But the next day, the activist Sainu Gota, speaking on behalf of the women, claimed that they had been sexually asssaulted (some reports say ‘gang-raped’) by the police. After this, they went missing for a while, but traveled to Nagpur on January 27th to file a case with a lawyer.
This is the point at which things got even murkier, as the Gadchiroli and Nagpur police arrested the activists and lawyer, and detained the women — apparently intending to record their statements — at the lawyers’ office. An FIR was then registered against Gota and his wife, which claimed (using the women’s statements) that they had forced the girls to go to Nagpur, while the medical examination apparently showed no traces of rape.
However, the lawyer, Nihal Singh Rathod petitioned the Nagpur High Court on Saturday evening, stating that the women were illegally removed from his office (despite his assertion that women cannot be arrested after sunset). The case is appearing before a regular court today, but the High Court insisted on Sunday that the women be shifted to a correction home. It also banned police officials from attempting to contact the women.
According to the lawyer, though, there are vested interests at work. He claimed that commandos were harassing adivasi people in the region for spearheading a recent protest against the Surjagad mining project in Gadchiroli, where Lloyd Metals has been engaged in iron ore extraction since last April. It’s hard to say what the court’s decision will throw up, but in the meantime, it’s important that the women are kept out of police custody.