Abuse Case Rouses India’s Middle Class

By LYDIA POLGREEN

Published: March 2, 2010

PANCHKULA, India — She was a gifted 14-year-old tennis player who idolized Steffi Graf and hoped to turn pro. He was a senior police official and president of the state lawn tennis club. He lured her to his office with a promise of special coaching that could make her tennis dreams come true, then groped her.

Keith Bedford for The New York Times

S. C. Girotra, whose daughter, Ruchika Girotra, pictured, was molested by a police official and later committed suicide.

The New York Times

After his daughter's suicide, Mr. Girotra left Panchkula.

This encounter set in motion a saga that has taken almost 20 years to unfold. The family of the girl, Ruchika Girotra, threatened to press charges. Shambhu Pratap Singh Rathore, a senior officer in the Haryana State Police, then waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation against Ruchika so severe that she eventually committed suicide. Her brother, Ashu, was falsely accused of stealing cars, and said he had been beaten and tortured in custody.

All the while Mr. Rathore, a flamboyant, mustachioed presence with deep ties to many of the state’s top politicians, rose through the ranks, retiring in 2002 as a state police chief.

Ruchika Girotra’s ordeal is hardly unique. Girls are molested all the time in India; powerful officials often abuse their office to avoid criminal prosecution; sclerotic courts are painfully slow and often corrupt.

But the case is emblematic of the way India’s growing middle class, egged on by a lively news media hungry for sensational stories, is increasingly unwilling to accept these seemingly immutable truths and willing to fight back.

And increasingly the courts of law and public opinion have forced the government to act against the grossest abuses of power. The fight for justice for Ruchika has become a symbol of middle-class rage at a broken system.

“This was a cute girl from a middle-class family,” said Ranjana Kumari, a leading women’s rights advocate and director of the Center for Social Research in New Delhi. “The media, the activist groups and eventually the politicians could no longer ignore it. It has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with India.”

Mr. Rathore, reached by telephone at his home, declined to discuss the case. “I am not talking to the media,” he said. “The courts will decide the issue.”

A chronology of the Girotra family’s ordeal has been pieced together from interviews with witnesses and court documents and police records.

On Aug. 11, 1990, Mr. Rathore went to the tidy home in Panchkula of S. C. Girotra, a widower and bank manager, to talk to him about Mr. Girotra’s daughter, Ruchika. The girl was a gifted player, Mr. Rathore said, and could go far with good training. The next day Ruchika went to see him at his office, bringing her friend Aradhna along.

Mr. Rathore asked the two girls to come into his office, then sent Aradhna out of the room. When she came back a few minutes later she saw Mr. Rathore pressing himself against Ruchika.

“I saw him holding Ruchika tightly,” she said. “She couldn’t even breathe.”

Startled, Mr. Rathore let go, and Ruchika ran out of the room. He turned to Aradhna and said, “Ask her to cool down, and I will do whatever she will say,” according to a police report.

Aradhna found Ruchika sobbing outside. As they walked home, they wondered what to do.

“We were really scared,” Aradhna said. “We asked ourselves, ‘Can we ignore it?’ ”

Even at that age they knew that a senior police officer like Mr. Rathore had the power to harm their families, she said. They decided to keep silent.

But the next day Mr. Rathore called Ruchika to his office again. Terrified, they told their parents. Mr. Girotra and several of his neighbors went to Mr. Rathore’s house to confront him. Mr. Girotra said that all he wanted was an apology.

But Mr. Rathore slipped away.

Mr. Girotra wrote to Haryana’s top government officials. At first everyone seemed to take the matter very seriously. The state’s director general of police, R. R. Singh, urged that criminal charges be filed against Mr. Rathore.

But the charges never materialized; under Indian criminal law the police have enormous latitude in deciding whether to open a case and did not do so. Instead, a campaign of harassment began against Ruchika and her family.

First she was expelled from school. The principal of the Roman Catholic school she attended claimed she had been thrown out for not paying her fees. Mr. Girotra tried to pay the small amount that was past due, but the principal refused to accept his money.

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Keith Bedford for The New York Times

S. C. Girotra, right, and his son, Ashu, said they were tormented for seeking justice against an official who molested Ashu's sister.

“I told her, ‘Look here, Ruchika is the victim,’ ” he said.

An investigation conducted years later discovered that many other girls, including Mr. Rathore’s daughter, were also behind on their tuition payments and had not been expelled.

Ruchika was hounded everywhere she went, so she began a life of confinement.

“She was such a bubbly character before all this,” said her brother, Ashu. But she folded into herself, blaming herself for the family’s misfortunes, wishing she had never told anyone about the incident.

The case against Mr. Rathore stalled. Mr. Girotra continued agitating, but he found every door closed to him.

“He was so powerful,” Mr. Girotra said of Mr. Rathore. “He had clout. All of the politicians were hand in glove with him.”

Three years passed. Ashu, by then a 19-year-old college student, was arrested on suspicion of stealing cars and imprisoned. He was beaten and fed only tea and bread for two months, he said.

“They tied my hands behind my back and hung me upside down,” he said. “They took off my trousers and beat my legs with leather belts and sticks.”

He was finally released on bail, and Mr. Girotra wept when he saw his son, wasted away and barely able to walk. Ruchika took it even harder.

“She held herself responsible for this state of affairs,” Ashu said.

Soon he was arrested again, and held for weeks without explanation. On Dec. 25, 1993, the police brought Ashu to the Girotras’ neighborhood and paraded him through the streets, battered and in handcuffs.

“The policemen told Ruchika: ‘You see the condition of your brother? The same thing will happen to your father also,’ ” Mr. Girotra said.

Three days later Mr. Girotra found his daughter unconscious in her bed, white froth on her lips. She had taken poison. She died the next day, at age 18.

Ashu was released the day after his sister’s body was cremated. A judge later concluded that the there was no evidence to support the charges against him. But the years of legal trouble shattered his dream of becoming an army officer or a civil servant.

Mr. Girotra sold his house as quickly as he could for a fraction of its value and moved with his son to another state.

As the Girotra family’s fortunes plummeted, Mr. Rathore’s career took off. He was promoted by a series of chief ministers, winning the top police post in the state in 1999.

But the Ruchika case did not go away. Ruchika’s friend Aradhna and her parents, Anand and Madhu Parkash, kept pressing for a full investigation.

“Ruchika’s death made it impossible for us to let the case go,” said Mr. Parkash, a silver-haired retired bureaucrat. “If someone is molesting my daughter’s friend today, someone will molest my daughter tomorrow.”

That decision came at a price. Mr. Rathore filed civil and criminal cases against the family. Mr. Parkash was demoted and ultimately forced to retire early at a lower pension.

But the telegenic, articulate Parkash family caught the attention of India’s flourishing 24-hour television news stations, which embraced Ruchika’s story as a crusade. The economic reforms of the early 1990s had given rise to a small but growing Indian middle class, and many families saw their own children in Ruchika.

The Parkash family waged a much-publicized battle in the courts to get charges filed against Mr. Rathore, and finally, in 1999, the Haryana High Court ruled in their favor.

In January 2000, nearly a decade after the incident, Mr. Rathore was charged with molesting Ruchika Girotra. He faced a sentence of up to two years in prison if convicted. He was placed on leave from the police force.

The trial stretched on for almost another decade. Mr. Rathore’s wife, Abha, a well-known High Court lawyer, defended him. Mr. Girotra said that the defense found endless ways to drag out the trial. There were more than 400 hearings and repeated continuances. Mrs. Rathore cross-examined witnesses for months.

Finally, on Dec. 21, 2009, nearly two decades after the crime, Mr. Rathore was convicted of molesting Ruchika. The judge gave him a reduced sentence of six months in prison after his wife argued that the long trial and Mr. Rathore’s age, 67, entitled him to leniency. He was also fined 1,000 rupees, about $22.

Mr. Rathore is out on bail as he appeals the verdict. Mr. Girotra and his son have filed new charges against Mr. Rathore for his involvement in the son’s arrest and treatment. Now the Girotra and Parkash families want the government to charge Mr. Rathore with a more serious crime, abetment to suicide, contending that he drove Ruchika to her death. That crime carries a 10-year sentence.

The government is planning changes to its criminal procedures in response to the case. Now officers will be required to file charges based on the victim’s statement alone in cases involving sexual crimes, a measure aimed at making it harder to evade investigation. It is also considering fast-track courts to deal with such crimes.

Mr. Parkash said these changes were proof that the people could take on the powerful and win.

“This is a fight against a rotten system,” he said. “We have to do our duty. I will take this case to its logical end, until the end of my life.”