Indian father left disfigured after challenging daughter's rapists

India has united to stand up against horrific rape crimes in country The night is jet-black. The headlights of our four-wheel drive sweep over potholes as columns of heavy trucks overtake us honking their horns, their tinsel blowing in the wind and sweeping the tarmac.
We left Delhi nearly eight hours ago and are lost, totally lost. A scant 300 kilometers from India’s capital and we are in another world, light-years from any urban  settlement. We’re going round in circles, surrounded by impenetrable darkness, in the heart of the Punjab not far from the Pakistani border. No decent road map, no sign posts, no GPS. Lost.
A scrap of paper bearing the scribbled name of a hamlet and the phone number of a relative of Bant Singh is passed around in our overheated car, into which our group of seven is squeezed. Mobile phones are out of range and there isn’t anyone to ask for directions. No one on the road, nor in any of the villages we cross. Only packs of roaming dogs, thin and agile like foxes. We feel as if we’ve plunged into a black hole.
After more than a year in India – it’s February, 2011 – I’m discovering a whole new dimension where, seemingly, anything might happen.
I met Bant Singh a month earlier during a literature festival in Jaipur – the “pink city” so loved by tourists – in Rajasthan. He’d been invited to sing at an evening concert, rounding off a day of learned debates and lectures by the cream of India’s intellectual elite. The contrast was stark between the urbane gathering and the ranting rage of the physically mutilated singer on stage. The high-tone crowd seemed vaguely embarrassed. They didn’t really listen.
After the performance, I rushed backstage. Bant Singh’s revolutionary songs were beginning to influence young protest singers in Delhi and, together with AFP’s video journalist, I wanted to request an interview in his home village. But his family, also present, wouldn’t let anyone near him. A cousin acted as a go-between, and we left with a stained piece of paper on which he’d jotted down an address in distant Punjab.
When you see Bant Singh for the first time, a natural reflex is to avert your eyes. His body is a mess. Two stumps of lacerated brown flesh, one shorter than the other, are all that remain of his arms. When he speaks, his foreshortened stubs dance in the air, like spikes, or maybe like blunt instruments.
He has one damaged and largely useless leg. The other was savagely amputated. Butchered would be the better word.
What happened?
Here’s the story. Bant Singh was a poor peasant and gifted singer when his 17-year old daughter was raped in 2006 by powerful neighboring landowners. Knowing the attackers, she alerted her father. That’s when he did something that is almost unheard of in India. He filed a complaint with the police, ignoring an unwritten but seldom flouted law: don’t challenge those higher up in the caste system unless you’re willing to pay a heavy price.
The outcome was, initially, a triumph for Bant Sing and his family. All seven rapists were sentenced to prison. But the story was not over.
Shortly after the verdict, Bant Singh was working in the field when seven strangers bearing axes and lead water pipes surrounded him. When they were done, his flesh was a mass of blubbering pulp. They left him for dead by the side of the road. After rough surgery, performed by doctors in league with the attackers, Bant Singh looked, in his own words, like a broken ragdoll. Only the light in his eyes was unbroken, hurling daggers at the world around him.
Long after the cattle had come in, we finally arrive in the courtyard of his shabby red-brick farm. There are no doors, no windows. A crowd of children immediately surrounds us and kiss our feet, a sign of respect lingering from another era. I want to shoo them away, but know it would be an insult.
It’s late and, along with our hosts, we break up into two groups. The men – our driver, two musicians accompanying us and the video journalist – are invited to sleep in a single bed in the room where Bant Singh shares a straw mattress with his youngest son. The women – our interpreter, Bant Singh’s wife, a French journalist and myself – sleep in another room that has a tarpaulin for a roof.
We’re all aware that the rapists of Bant Singh’s daughter have just been released on bail, and fear of what may happen in the night seeps into our minds. Will they come back for more revenge? The night is long. The slightest sound, a rustling of the wind, makes us jumpy. We know what these people are capable of. The lone naked bulb in the house stays lit all night, a feeble attempt to show that our enemies will not find us sleeping. A long stick leans against the wall by the door, just in case.
A goat is tied to my bedpost and its pale blue eyes observe me intensely. I wonder which of us is more surprised by this strange encounter.
"I don’t care that my limbs are gone, because they didn’t get my tongue,” Bant Singh tells me the following morning. He’s a Communist party activist and points out a red flag on the roof of his house.
It’s a symbol, he says, of all the blood spilt since history began.
"We proletarians want the same rights as the rich people, we want respect for our lives and we want equality. I throw the words of my songs into the air like drops of blood.”
Our interview is interrupted whenever Bant Singh needs to pee. He calls his son for assistance and urinates in our presence in a bowl that he can’t hold himself. We also take a break when I need a cigarette. The interpreter and I hide in a corner because women smoking in public are frowned upon.
Bant Singh, who says he’s “between 40 and 42”, has hooked up with some of New Delhi’s hottest performers, including Taru Dalmia, a hip-hop and ska singer whose lyrics drip with disgust at how modern India’s economic development has left the poorest members of society by the wayside.
“Most Indian music is just entertainment. I wanted to meet local revolutionary singers who see things my way because we need political songs in India,” says Taru, who has written a few songs, in Punjabi, for Bant Singh’s voice and his own electro band.
Taru says Bant Singh “is a kind of hero. He is an example for how it’s possible to struggle against adversity. Even his body is a revolutionary tool.”
Two years later, I’m back in Delhi, contemplating the broken body of another man in a wheelchair likewise punished because he dared break caste-bound rules. Unbowed, he’s ready to bear witness against five men charged with raping his girlfriend, who died of her injuries.
He’s been unable to walk since getting beaten up himself on Dec 16 last year after his girlfriend was repeatedly raped, attacked and bludgeoned with a rusty iron bar. The official version says she died of internal lesions in a hospital in Singapore, 13 days after her ordeal. But rumors say she really died before, in India, and the authorities paid off the family and took the body abroad to avoid violent protests at home.
Since my encounter with Bant Singh there have been thousands of rapes, attacks and sex-motivated murders in India. They are so common that one ends up fighting off compassion fatigue. The routine murder of fetuses and newborns; violent kidnappings; legless cripples throwing themselves at cars waiting at traffic lights -- all these nameless horrors have left me numb.
On Dec 19, when I file my first report about the rape on a Delhi bus of a student returning home after a night at the movies, I am sure that this event – just another in the endless parade of sordid incident – will leave public opinion undisturbed.
How wrong I was. This time, the people of New Delhi are outraged. This, finally, is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. But why?
Because the rape happened in Delhi and not in some nameless village in the middle of nowhere.
Because it happened after a cinema outing in the business center of Saket, where middle-class Indians take their children for Sunday walks.
Because the film was “Life of Pi”, which features an Indian as its main character.
Because the woman was raped even though she was with a man, which should have protected her from any attack.
Afterward, there is excitement and anger in the swelling crowd of demonstrators; hope that things may finally change. It reminds me of 2011, when the Anna Hazare movement against corruption gained wide backing.