By Ila Ananya
Late last year we heard about police officials in Kerala who asked a gang rape survivor which man out of the people who’d raped her gave her the most pleasure. Everyone had been angry and shocked, but this time a policeman in Rampur seems to have thought he can go a step further.
A 37-year-old woman who’d been raped by two men at gunpoint earlier this year, found that the officer she made the complaint to simply told her that if she wanted him to take action against the accused (men who weren’t in jail making her fear for her life), she’d need to have sex with him. It happened more than once, and the sub inspector Jai Prakash Singh would reportedly call her to his house at night, and she reportedly refused every time, until she suddenly found out a fortnight ago that he’d filed a report closing the gang rape case.
Indian Express reports that the woman had recorded this conversation when it happened, and finally approached the Superintendent of Police with the recording. Investigation into the charges are apparently on, even though the police claimed that the voice in the recording didn’t match with Singh’s voice. But this case is only one example of how all rhetoric of women not complaining to the police about sexual harassment is a bogus statement, because this is what happens when they do complain.
It also reminds us of a similar case in Rajasthan earlier this month. India Today reported that a woman who’d been rushing from station to station to get her husband released (he’d been arrested for trading opium), was told by Kamaldan Charan, the officer in charge of the Rajiv Gandhi police station, that if she wanted her husband freed, she’d have to give him two lakhs, and sleep with him. It was a ‘compromise’ and he said he’d come to her house at night.
When the woman complained to the Anti-Corruption Bureau, things unbelievably still continued in the same pattern — the officers there reportedly decided to lay a ‘trap’. The woman was told to call Charan to her house, and some moments after he arrived, the police knocked on her door and arrested him. Why couldn’t the ACB have done all this without laying such a trap that could have very easily gone wrong? Nobody knows.
In each of these cases it seems like the police men making these demands from women are just making them because they think they can get away with what they want. Perhaps they’re also sure nothing will happen to them even if the woman makes a complaint against them. After all, they do have the power.