| |
CRIME: WOMEN KILLERS
Murder She Wrote
Domestic strife, love triangles and lure of wealth
are leading a growing number of women to homicide in Rajasthan
By Rohit Parihar
|
|
|
WOMEN SCORNED: Convicts with their children
at a women's jail
|
Initially,
17-year-old Soya Bhatt was in awe of her newly-wedded husband. Tall, dark
and well-built, Ramesh was a very strong man at 23, she thought. That
perhaps explained why he had been so forceful on their first night together.
The next evening when he pulled her towards him, he stripped her naked,
brutally beat her up, sprinkled kerosene on her bruised body and held
a burning matchstick to it. What could this be, perverse love at its worst?
Bhatt shuddered at the thought, even as she survived the burns. What,
in heaven's name, could be in store for her on Day Three? She would know
sooner than she expected. When he returned to their hutment at Surana
village of Jalore district in Rajasthan at noon, the inebriated Ramesh
yanked his trembling wife aside and closed the door shut. But a few hours
later when the door opened, it was Ramesh who was found dead.
|
|
| SOYA BHATT, 17, charged with killing
her husband, FACING TRIAL Newly-wed Bhatt suffocated her husband
to death after he burnt her and tried to strangle her. |
"He tried to choke me," a pale Bhatt
told the police later. According to the story she related to them, Ramesh
had once again beaten her, this time with a camel seat, before trying
to strangulate her. A desperate Bhatt had managed to gather together all
her survival instincts and suffocate him to death with the same seat.
Although the police initially booked her for murder, they are convinced
she acted in self-defence. "Going by our investigations, prosecuting
her for murder would be unfair," says Malini Aggarwal, superintendent
of police, Jalore. In custody in Jaipur jail and facing trial, Bhatt could
well be freed if the court is similarly convinced.
|
|
| SUKHWINDER KAUR, 30, accused of killing
her children, ON TRIAL Kaur poisoned her children and herself
because her unemployed husband used to beat her up. |
But Bhatt's cell mate, Kamla Meghwal, a mother
of three and fourth-time pregnant, may not be so lucky. She too faces
charges of murdering her husband, who was an alcoholic and a habitual
wife-beater. Following an altercation, she had hit him with a sharp-edged
log and a pressure cooker. In an intoxicated state, he had fallen to the
ground and bled to death. "He fell on his own and got injured,"
Meghwal now says, fearing that she would meet the same fate as Susheela,
another woman in the lock-up who was sentenced to life for doing away
with her husband.
A woman killing a man is not usual. Especially
in a society that has for centuries decreed the subordination of women
to the point of subjecting them to sati on the husband's pyre. But such
crimes are increasing in Rajasthan these days. Between 1987 and 1997,
there were five women serving a life sentence in Jaipur jail. In four
years since then, the number has jumped to 21, 15 of them landing in the
jail in the past 16 months. In Sayla police station in Jalore, a perplexed
policeman says that in his decade-and-a-half service, he never saw a case
of a wife killing a husband. Until April this year, when there were two
such incidents. Across the state, there are over 80 women in jail, convicted
or facing trial for murder of men. As Ram Ahuja, a Jaipur-based sociologist
who has studied crime, points out, "In 99 per cent of such cases,
the killer women have had a primary relationship with the victim."
Most of the victims were husbands. Lacking the urban option of a divorce
to escape from an unhappy marriage, the women often found themselves with
only two ways out: killing themselves or their husbands.
But in what seems to be a marked departure from
traditional thinking, more and more women are realising that killing themselves
serve little purpose. "Women resort to such a step only when they
are extremely depressed and when they worry about the fate of their children
after they are gone," explains Dr Shiv Gautam, who is in charge of
the Government Mental Hospital in Jaipur. But there was always the possibility
of the woman surviving and being subsequently ostracised by society for
the unmotherly act of trying to take the lives of her own children.
That is precisely what happened to Sukhwinder
Kaur of Alwar earlier this month. Unable to take her unemployed husband
Gurdutt Singh's badgerings and beatings for money, Kaur fed poison to
her three children before consuming some herself. But she and one of the
children survived. Now Kaur faces charges of a double murder, besides
attempted suicide. In a similar case last month, a trial court sentenced
Amro Devi of Laxmangarh in Alwar to life for killing her 18-month-old
son. According to the police, she had jumped into a well with her two
children after her husband took her to task for being rough on their son.
The villagers managed to save the mother and the daughter but not the
infant boy.
To be fair, it's not always a case of a harassed
wife turning killer. Among the remaining 50 per cent of the sentenced
women, a majority are cases of fateful love triangles. Pramilla, 20 and
a mother of three, for instance, faces murder charges along with her brother
and lover. Having allegedly killed her husband Sriniwas in Jaipur last
year, the trio claimed he was missing. Later, the police cracked the mystery
and arrested them. Similarly, Urmilla Sharma, a young widow in Dausa,
was arrested in March for allegedly killing her neighbour, Ram Sarup,
with whom she was having an affair. When her loyalties shifted to another
man, Ranjita, the two allegedly conspired to get rid of Sarup.
There are any number of such cases: 20-year-old
Prem Bai of Chittorgarh who burnt her aged husband to death when he found
out about her affair with another man; Anita Bhatia, the convent-educated
Delhiite daughter-in-law of Madan Lal Bhatia of Sri Ganganagar, who connived
with her lover, Mohammad Shakir, to fatally stab her husband Ravinder.
She wanted to get her hands on the Rs 15 lakh that Ravinder had come into.
In the Bhatia case, the lovers were convicted for life on the testimony
provided by the killer's six-year-old son who was an eyewitness to the
incident. Nothing, not least Bhatia's "liberated" argument that
she and her husband had been incompatible for years, could help bail her
out. In yet another bizarre case, Gita, 24, of Tonk has been accused of
killing her alleged lover Movan after her husband Banwari, who suspected
she was cheating on him, challenged her to prove her fidelity.
|
|
METRO TODAY
Web
Exclusives
