The rapist who never was: Let's not forget the man who destroyed Aruna Shanbaug's life

The headline says it all. Cops to trace Aruna Shanbaug’s assailant if he is still alive. For 42 years Aruna Shanbaug lay comatose in a Mumbai hospital. She was the subject of a landmark court case about euthanasia that went all the way to the Supreme Court. There is a law that bears her name that allows passive euthanasia under strict conditions even though it could never be applied to her. [caption id=“attachment_2252048” align=“alignleft” width=“380” class=" “]  Aruna Shanbaug. PTI[/caption] As the front-page coverage of her death shows, the Aruna Shanbaug case was hardly a low-profile one. Yet now that she is dead, we have no idea if the man responsible for putting her into that vegetative state is dead or alive. The only thing we can be sure of is that he is not in prison. Shanbaug was assaulted on 27 November, 1973. In 1980, Sohanlal Bhartha Walmiki the wardboy who assaulted her walked free into the world and disappeared. According to Pinky Virani’s book about Shanbaug , Walmiki was angry with her because she had accused him of stealing the food of the dogs used in medical experiments and threatened to report him. Now that Shanbaug is dead the Mumbai Police is exploring the possibility of adding Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code to the case four decades after the fact. But that’s only if they can find Walmiki. Little is known about him even though he was a hospital employee. He is a native of Bulandshahr and had got married shortly before he raped Shanbaug. Apparently not even a picture exists of him in hospital and police files or court records! “We have been able to maintain the documents that are at the most 20 years old, but as this case is more than 40 years old, we are not sure whether Shanbaug’s papers would be in the records,” said senior police inspector Sunil Tondwalkar from the Bhoiwada police station which had registered the original case in 1973 according to DNA. Pinki Virani, who wrote a biography of Shanbaug and petitioned the Supreme Court for a mercy killing tells The Telegraph “Hospital ward boys claim he moved to Delhi, changed his identity and went on to work in a Delhi hospital.” If that is true, the sweeper-cum-wardboy who throttled her with a dog chain in a Mumbai hospital, found a job and a second life in another hospital. That boggles the mind. What most people also do not realize is that while everyone knows that Aruna Shanbaug was raped that night in the hospital after she had changed into her civvies in an empty operation theatre, the police records and FIR do not mention rape anywhere. The medical examination of Shanbaug testified after a “finger test” that her virginity was intact but the court never took into account the fact that she was sodomized. Though the judgment said “the accused had gone there with the intention to rape” Sohanlal was never charged with rape. He was convicted of attempted murder and robbery because he had stolen a watch and her earrings. The reason apparently was Shanbaug’s fiancé, a junior doctor, who was afraid the rape charges would tarnish her reputation. Of course there is no way to know what Shanbaug might have wanted. According to the Times of India, the then dean of the hospital, Dr. Deshpande chose not to report the anal rape to spare her fiancé public “embarrassment”. Walmiki had sodomized her instead of vaginally raping her because she was in the middle of her menstrual cycle. He could have been charged under Section 377. Her fiancé was not even a complainant in the case. A former hospital matron said he hoped she would come around one day and they could get married. But that never happened. Eventually he moved got married and moved abroad. Shanbaug lay in her hospital bed while a court battle ensued over her life. Walmiki was sentenced to seven years, served his time and walked free, a beneficiary of our social squeamishness about rape. Much is rightly being made of the care and devotion with which several generations of nurses at the KEM hospital took care of their battered and comatose colleague for over four decades. Journalist Sagarika Ghose tweeted those nurses who never gave up on Shanbaug were the “true bharat ratnas” because “(e)very day for decades, without fail, they brought justice, dignity to Aruna.” Dignity for sure. Justice? Not so much. The system failed her in 1973 when the man who raped her was never charged with rape because the stigma of being raped outweighed the brutality of the assault. In the name of protecting her reputation, the system basically covered up what Walmiki actually did. Outrage of justice trumped, as the law quaintly puts it, outraging the modesty of a woman. Justice failed her then and it fails her right now as the police confess they have no idea where Walmiki is or if he is even dead or alive. When Virani tried to file an FIR on rape, she says the Delhi police told her they would not be able to find him and a lookout notice would not work either. After the ‘Nirbhaya’ case we saw pictures of her rapists flashed all over the media. Nirbhaya’s identity still remains hidden in the Indian media and was cited as one of the reasons why the Leslee Unwin’s BBC documentary was banned in India. In contrast we have woken up to photographs of Aruna Shanbaug all over our newspapers today. We see Shanbaug with her twisted limbs and unseeing eyes. But there’s not a single photograph of the man responsible for her agony of the last 40 years. The assault took all of ten minutes. In the case of Aruna Shanbaug, her rapist got seven years. She, on the other hand, got a life sentence.