Delhi gangrape: The parallels between juvenile accused 'Bhura' and Nirbhaya

We do not officially know their names.

His nickname is Bhura (or the brown one) - a rather nondescript name in a country of a billion plus brown people. And there was no reason his life should not have been just as unremarkable.

The name the media gave her is Nirbhaya (or the fearless one) because of what happened on 16 December, 2012 when their lives intersected fatally. “Until December 16, Nirbhaya was just one among millions of faceless young people in India trying to break through the stifling fixity of their lives,” writes Shoma Chaudhury in a profile of the victim for Newsweek .

The same, ironically, could hold true for Bhura.

On that night Bhura beckoned the young woman and her friend to get on a bus in Delhi. Now he has become infamous as the juvenile accused in the Delhi gangrape case. The media has said he was one of the most vicious of the rapists. His real name is hidden from the public because of his age but he has still become a symbol just as his victim has. But who is Bhura beyond being the poster boy of evil, the object of a legal tug-of-war about the very definition of juvenile?

India Today deserves credit for going into the small village in western Uttar Pradesh to try and uncover the story of “India’s Most Hated” (in the current print issue of the magazine ). Oddly their stories have strange parallels. Up to a point.

Both have become symbols of a new India, one that’s flown the coop, that’s struggling to create a new life in the city. Both seemed to have little time for the ancestral village. The young woman hated going back because there wasn’t anything there for her, her mother told Newsweek. Bhura’s mother tells India Today she saw him briefly twice or thrice in the last six-seven years after he went to the city, as a boy, to find work.

But there is a crucial difference between the circumstances of the two – education, opportunity and means, modest as they might be. Nirbhaya came from the lower middle class but her father worked double shifts to educate the children in a private English medium school in the hope that it would be their ticket to the future. She worked at a call center to pay her bills. That’s perhaps why her brutal death struck such a chord because it snuffed out hope on so many levels.

Chaudhury writes Nirbhaya embodies a new India – “India’s cities and small towns are full of young men and women like her: restless and on the move; hungry for an education, for jobs, for English, for social mobility, for belonging…They love their families with a grave sense of duty, but they long to leave the old ways behind…They’ve sloughed off old skins, but not quite acquired the new. Just one chromosome binds them all: aspiration. They are the neo–middle class.”

Who knows what Bhura’s “aspirations” were and India Today sheds little light about that. His jobs are the jobs of a poor boy with no education – bus cleaner, dishwasher, helper to a milkman, dhaba assistant.

What is striking about this story is how little of Bhura himself is revealed unlike Nirbhaya. His mother remembers the time he was born only vaguely. A village elder strains to remember him. Bhura was a good boy says another villager by which he seems to mean he remembers nothing particularly bad about him. The man who owned the dhaba remembers him as a boy who didn’t have a mobile phone, was not into girls or cricket or movies.

“He was just a normal boy trying to make ends meet,” writes India Today though nothing about it seems normal – neither the boy who is not into girls/cricket/movies/mobile phones or the one accused of that horrific crime on the bus in December. It’s as if no one paid much attention to Bhura because boys like him don’t really matter.

If Bhura is a symbol of something, writes India Today, it’s “of an India where penury forces children to leave their homes in search of work in the cities.” Bhura was ten or eleven when he left. It’s a family of seven, with Bhura being the oldest child. The father is a psychiatric patient. The daughters earn Rs 50 a day as farm labourers when there is work.

On the day India Today visits their homes, work is stopped because of rain. The youngest boy, barely three, has to make do with pinches of sugar to calm him when he cries. The wheat silo is empty. The family says they have not seen a vegetable in weeks. This is grindingly poor India with few means of escape.

It’s always tricky trying to humanize someone accused of an inhuman crime. It can be read as an attempt to drum up sympathy for the accused, to make him a victim as well. Socially it is easier for us to call for death sentences and treatment as an adult as long as Bhura remains a cipher, faceless and story-less. It is equally tempting to read the story of Bhura as a parable, a cautionary story about the maw of inequality in the new India, where a boy like Bhura really never had a chance of making it.

But that is terribly unjust not only to Nirbhaya’s “ sangharsh ” to make something of herself but also to the millions of others who also live in bleak poverty like Bhura without turning into monsters and rapists or murderers. Bhura had few choices but he clearly made some terrible choices in Delhi soon after he left the dhaba where he worked for reasons unknown. Yet that poverty hangs inescapably over his story like a cloud, even as it cannot excuse the crime he is accused of.

On 5 August, the Juvenile Justice Board will pronounce its verdict on Bhura’s fate. Before that a bench of the Supreme Court will hear Dr Subramanian Swamy’s plea that the “mental and intellectual maturity” of an offender instead of just the age limit of 18 be taken into consideration. Bhura might inadvertently cause radical change in the juvenile justice system. Or he might not. Either way, he has little by way of a future, not that he ever seemed to have had much.

“(A)fter doing what he did, he had better not show his face here,” the village pradhan tells India Today. “Whether he’s hanged or not, the boy is dead to us.”

India’s Most Hated is the cover story of the issue of India Today currently available in newsstands.