Soni Sori’s travails did not begin only with her arrest by the Delhi Crime Branch on 4 October 2011. As an educated woman from a politically active tribal family (her father was a sarpanch for 15 years, her uncle, a Communist Party of India Member of Legislative Assembly; her elder brother, a Congressman, and her nephew, a journalist) in a Maoist stronghold, when she along with her nephew, Lingaram Kodopi, who had studied journalism in Delhi, began voicing the concerns of her people, this automatically brought them into the radar of both the Maoists and the police and also into conflict with some powerful local people. The police tried to co-opt them as informers but when they paid no heed, it began to harass them.On 30 August 2009, the police took Lingaram away and kept him in a police station toilet for 40 days. He was released on 10 October only after a habeas corpus petition was filed in the Chhattisgarh High Court. In 2011, the police intrigued and picked up Lingaram and one B K Lala, a contractor of the Essar group, from their houses on 9 September but claimed that they were caught red-handed exchanging money in the marketplace. Soni, who had tried to know the whereabouts of Lingaram, was declared absconding. Both were charged for acting as conduits for extortion money being paid by the Essar group to the Maoists. Despite the fact that the entire episode was exposed as a silly concoction by the Chhattisgarh police (see Tehelka, 15 October 2011), the police has persisted with the charge, unleashing inhuman atrocities and still holding Soni in jail even after her acquittal in six out of eight cases.
After her arrest on 4 October 2011 and when she was in police custody, Soni was brutally tortured. She described this torture in her letters, how she was pulled out of her cell at the Dantewada police station at midnight on 8/9 October and taken to superintendent of police, Ankit Garg’s room, where she was stripped, sexually assaulted, and two stones were put in her vagina and one in her rectum. Upon a SC order, NRS Medical College, Kolkata examined her and its report confirmed that two stones had been found to have been inserted in her vagina and one in her anus, which were the primary cause of the abdominal pain from which she was suffering. Nonetheless, the SC declined her plea to keep her in any jail outside Chhattisgarh, gave the state government 45 days to respond and virtually sent her back to her torturers.
In her letters she has specifically levelled accusations against Garg, saying: “He has taken my all. I have been tortured in ways I can’t describe here.” Her husband, running a restaurant at their native place, was already arrested as a Maoist, tortured so badly that he turned paralytic and eventually succumbed to his injuries. Soni was not allowed interim bail to attend his funeral and make arrangements for her three daughters aged five, eight and 13. Her case evoked international outrage and people like Noam Chomsky and Jean Dreze protested against the “brutal treatment meted out” to her to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh but without avail. Soni Sori languishes in jail watching her world getting ruined bit by bit and her tormentor Ankit Jain getting a police medal for gallantry from the President of India.
- Tehelka Story by Shoma Ghosh here
- Soni Sori Blog Page
- The Hindu Report here
- Hardnews Media Report here
- Kracktivism here
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