Bhopal gangrape victim bounces back with grit

Bhopal: A rape scars a victim for a lifetime. But not Anita (name changed), a Bhopal teenager who was gangraped recentl. She has not let her ordeal shatter her life.

With determination and grit, the 19-year-old gandrape survivor has fought off her rapists, the unfriendly system and her “low spirits” to bring her life back on the track, burying her 52-day-ordeal.

The IAS aspirant now wants to clear the civil services exam and become an IPS officer to clean the system and punish criminals.

“I am absolutely normal now and ready to resume my preparations for civil services examination,” said the college girl, who was waylaid and brutally raped by four people while returning home from her coaching classes here on October 31.

While all the four accused got life imprisonment till death, the teenager wants a harsher punishment for them.

“It feels good to get justice. But, their punishment is not harsh enough to scare others. Such criminals should be hanged in public. It is time lawmakers thought of amending the law to provide death sentence to the rapists,” said the braveheart, who is preparing to resume her coaching class in the New Year.  

He relatives, however, are all praise for the mental toughness she has shown to overcome the setback. “She has displayed amazing resilience by emerging unscathed mentally after the life-shattering incident. She had faced all odds during the period with grit that astounded her kin, friends and acquaintances,” said one of her close relatives, who was with her when she was going through tribulations.

The accused had attempted to strangle her, leaving her unconscious. They fled assuming that she had died.

She soon found to her horror that her ordeal had just begun when the police refused to accept her complaint due to a jurisdiction dispute related to the crime spot. It was shocking when one police officer dismissed her complaint as a “film story”, she recalled.

She, however, refused to give up. Along with her relatives,  she revisited the crime scene, spotted the perpetrators and overpowered one of them to produce him before the police as evidence of the crime, leading to registration of her FIR.

Anita’s determined struggle for justice had shaken the state government forcing the chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan to intervene and set up a fast track court for the trial. The public outrage sparked by the incident led to suspension of fivepolice personnel for laxity.

An alleged attempt was later made to botch up her medical test reports, apparently, to show that it was not rape, but “consensual sex”. Two guilty doctors were dismissed over the issue.