I will get solace only when police shoot all five who burnt my daughter: Unnao rape survivor’s father

The 65-year-old father of the Unnao rape survivor on Friday said the Unnao police should gun down the five people, who were arrested in connection with his daughter’s

The 65-year-old father of the Unnao rape survivor on Friday said the Unnao police should gun down the five people, who were arrested in connection with his daughter’s case, just as the Hyderadabad police had killed four men who had allegedly gang-raped and murdered a veterinary doctor there.

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“I will find solace only when the Unnao police shoot all the five who burnt my daughter,” said the father, who is a blacksmith by profession.

“My daughter’s condition is extremely critical only God can save her now,” he said.

The Unnao woman sustained 90 per cent burn injuries after she was allegedly set ablaze by five men on Thursday morning when she was on her way to a court to appear in the hearing of the rape case she had filed. She was later brought to Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi for medical treatment.

The four accused in the Hyderabad case were gunned down in an encounter with the police on early Friday morning.

“She is the prettiest of all my seven children. She and the other younger than her were good at studies, they always scored good marks,” the Unnao woman’s father said with a solemn face, wearing crumpled clothes at his mud house which has a frontage of less than 15 feet and a thatch roof.

There was an eerie silence on the narrow village road leading to the house as only a few came to show their solidarity.

“I never allowed financial constraints to come in the way of their studies. I used to save what was left of the family income to pay for the school or college fees,” he said sitting on a wooden bed around which policemen sat fiddling with their cell phones.

When they were children, he would take his daughters to the primary school in Gaura, some two kilometres from the house. When they grew up, they began going on their own, he said.

“There are few girls from my caste to have graduated. She is one of them,” he said.

Last year, she decided to pursue her dream of becoming a police woman. She filled the form and got the call for the written examination. But luck was not on her side, he recalled, as the bus tyre got punctured and she arrived at the examination centre 10 minutes late.

The officials did not allow her to appear in the exam, no matter how much she begged them, he said.

“Look what they have done to her. They did what Shivam Trivedi had said they would do. After coming out of jail, he had said he will burn her alive,” he said.

After the threat, the woman’s father asked her to accompany him to the police station and file a report.

“My daughter asked me whether the police act will act as they had not done so when she complained of rape or when I was beaten up mercilessly by Shivam’s father Hari Shankar in April,” he said.

She had faith in the court, which had ordered the FIR on her complaint in March this year. She told her father she would tell the court about the threats during the court hearing in Rae Bareli on Thursday.

Just a day before, Shivam had come and threatened to burn her and him with others if she did not withdraw the complaint, the father alleged.

Shivam’s father had assaulted the woman’s father in April this year when he received summons from the state women commission.

“I was beating iron at my place of work; Pradhanji (village headman) came and dragged me out, slapping me repeatedly,” he said.

He went to the police twice with his written complaint, first on April 30 and then on May 4. Each time the application was accepted but it was not registered. Each time, he said, Shivam’s father was at the police station smiling at him.

“They were regularly threatening us; they are big people. No one in the village can afford to go against them. Instead, people always conveyed their threats and messages. Had the police acted my daughter would not have been fighting for her life.”

A blacksmith by profession, for the last 50 years, he has been working just outside the house, usually alone. Sometimes, his eldest son helps. Despite being the only blacksmith in village, his daily earning never touched Rs 200.

“It is Rs 100 a day and on a good day I make Rs 150,” he said.