No one killed the Walayar sisters

On the eve of January 13, 2017, the death of a 13-year-old girl was reported at a local police station in Walayar, a town situated in the Palakkad district of Kerala, along the Tamil Nadu border. The girl was found hanging in the one-room, make-shift shack she lived in with her mother and step-father. The post-mortem revealed signs of sexual assault so a FIR was registered, and a suspect arrested. But he was released on bail the same night, and no follow-up was done.

The incident died down and the world would never have known about it, if not for a second incident. Barely two months later the girl’s sister, a nine-year-old, was found hanging from the same wooden rafter. The autopsy report was also eerily similar with regard to signs of sexual assault. This child had been subjected to unnatural sex prior to death. This time around, the police sprang into action, and four people were arrested within days – two of whom were close relatives of the girls’ mother. A third person was a neighbor, while a fourth was a friend of the step-father. All lived nearby in the same Dalit colony the couple lived in, and all four had access to the girls while the parents, who are daily wagers, went to work.

But by then, crucial evidence had already been destroyed, by accident or otherwise. The bodies had been cremated, and the clothes worn by the victims burnt, reportedly on the advice of a local astrologer. Citing the absence of proof, all four of the accused were acquitted by a special POCSO court in Palakkad, in October 2019. There was a public outcry,  and it was alleged that the accused were let off because of their connections with the ruling CPI(M). (Ironically, the victims were also ardent supporters of the same party.)

An action council was formed, termed the Walayar Samara Samithi, and the girls’ mother, who publicly identified herself by her name, V Bhagyavathi, started an indefinite strike, seeking justice. Meanwhile, one of the main accused committed suicide, in November 2020.

As the Kerala assembly elections drew near, the Walayar case was again in the limelight, to the extent of tilting vote banks. Bhagyavathi was fielded as an independent candidate, to contest against none other than the Chief Minister of Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan, in the Dharmadom constituency. She chose a little girl’s frock as the election symbol.

Probably no other case has as many versions of the crime and the subsequent deaths of the two girls. There is the police version, the neighbour’s version, the mother’s version and the versions of different political party supporters. VM Marsen, convener of the Walayar Samara Samithi alleges that there was plenty of evidence which the police suppressed. “The younger girl had revealed that she had seen two men with their faces covered run out of the shed on the day her sister died. But her statement wasn’t recorded before her own death. We are sure that she was hanged by the accused for being a prime witness to the murder of her sister,” says Marsen who also suspects that there is someone else with a major political clout involved, which is the reason why the police were in a hurry to hush up the case from day one.

Meanwhile, another section points fingers at Bhagyavathi herself, for allegedly allowing strangers access inside a one-room hut with two young daughters, for not filing a case on time, for participating in the destroying of evidence.While such questions might seem reasonable, we need to introspect on the standards with which we judge a Dalit woman living in abject poverty, says Marsen.

“Bhagyavathi herself had a miserable childhood. At the age of 13 she was stayed at a Christian convent where she worked till the age of 24 when she got married. However, she soon found that her husband had another wife and children. Bhagyavathi is illiterate and was already pregnant, but with the help of a document writer, she sought legal divorce from her husband. She married her current partner, gave birth to her first daughter and later had a second daughter and a son with him,” says Marsen.

C R Neelakantan, activist and a patron of the action council, clarifies that it is not true that Bhagyavathi didn’t try to protect her daughters. “She had forbidden the prime accused, her nephew, from visiting them after getting to know about the assault once, but didn’t take it up with the police because she was scared for the daughters’ reputation. The girls were always in a boarding school because Bhagyavathi didn’t want them to live in the shack.But they were made to go home by the school authorities in 2016, after the elder girl started menstruating. And that was when the assaults started,” he says.

So if the children had continued to live in the hostel, they would have been alive now? “Probably,” says Neelakantan. It needs to be noted that the case has similarities to the 2016 rape and murder of the Dalit law student Jisha, who also lived in a flimsy make-shift shack, where she was murdered and there too a person could easily enter the shack. Jisha’s mother was also accused of being a woman of loose character, cited as a reason why strangers loitered around.

Marsen also points out that Bhagyavathi had applied for financial help to build a proper house of her own under an SC ST Housing Scheme and had even started the construction. However, the authorities revoked the benefit citing that the plot was bigger than the sanctioned size in the scheme, he says. “She continued with the construction pledging the deed of her ancestral house. It’s only after receiving compensation for the death of her daughters under the SC ST Atrocities Act, that she has been able to get back the house deed. But the delay cost her the lives of her daughters.”

Also, Bhagyavathi and her husband are construction workers, and were working at a place 10 km away when the incidents occurred. The nature of construction work is such that they often had to work till late at night, and the couple had no choice but to leave the children with relatives nearby, Neelakantan says.

At the same time, a cousin of the two girls had reportedly revealed that the older girl had confided to her that she was being sexually assaulted, was in pain, and that she was afraid of the accused. But the victim did not open up during a sexual awareness class in school.

The elder girl had also been found standing during classes on several occasions because she was in ‘’great pain’’, which neither the school authorities nor the mother seem to have investigated.

A week before the Kerala elections were held on April 6, at the request of Bhagyavathi, the Kerala High Court directed Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) to take over the case, and investigation has started in the case. If the right authorities conduct the investigation, evidences will be available, and the truth will come out, feels Marsen.

As the state awaits the election results, the issue is spoken of more in its political context than anything else. Politics apart, the sad truth is that no person or authority offered the two girls the much needed security they badly needed – neither the family, nor the school, nor child welfare authorities, nor police, or the government.