In a Nation Convulsed By Kathua-Unnao, Guru Dutt’s Words Hit Home

(Video Editor: Mohd Ibrahim)

Iconic film-maker Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa came as a picture of ideological anguish convulsing a 10-year-old independent India in 1957. The glow of freedom had been edged out by cynicism over rising social divisions, inequalities of wealth, feudal assertions, and political schisms with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s government.

This lyrical wail is a timeless challenge to India’s imperfect democracy.

Sixty years later, two horrible rapes have again devastated India’s conscience. If Guru Dutt were alive today, I am sure he would have pulled up these stanzas to the top of his tortured song:

Guddi, eight years old, had ocean-blue eyes. Her family belonged to the 60,000-strong Bakarwal tribe, a patriotic group of people who had twice alerted Indian forces against marauding enemies from Pakistan, in 1947 and just before the Kargil War in 1999.

On that fateful day of the 10th of January 2018, she had taken her ponies for grazing at the meadows of Rasana village in Jammu.

Guddi was kidnapped and taken to the local temple, Devasthan. She was given clonazepam, a potent medicine to control seizures and anxiety. And repeatedly raped. Right inside the holy temple of Lord Ram.

Four days later, the local policeman said he wanted to rape her one more time. After which, his juvenile co-conspirator choked her with her dupatta and smashed her head with heavy stone.

Meanwhile in Unnao...

Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, in the dustbowl of Unnao, Gudiya was a sprightly 17-year-old who was in awe, along with everybody else in village Makhi, of the Thakur (upper caste strongman) she called bhaiyya (elder brother). He was the four-time local legislator who had bounced across every political party, from Congress to BSP to SP, and was now in the ruling BJP.

One day in June 2017, bhaiyya called Gudiya over to help find her a job. Instead, he raped her. He asked her to keep quiet, or he would kill her father. She kept mum. Four days later, his goons kidnapped and gangraped her.

Nine months later, helpless and frustrated, she went to Lucknow and tried to immolate herself in front of Yogi Adityanath’s residence.

While she was in Lucknow, her father was brutally thrashed by Thakur’s brother in Makhi. But instead of arresting the perpetrators, the police detained her injured father on charges of “waving around a pistol”.

Four days later, he died because of “shock due to septicemia, peritonitis, ascending colon perforation”.

Guddi’s rape and murder is rapidly communalised. Across the Gangetic plains, Gudiya grieves the loss of her father; her shrieks through a cloth-covered face fall on deaf political ears.

But then, the Prime Minister left for a foreign trip. Other political leaders have to campaign in Karnataka. Young India has to cheer for their favorite IPL cricket clubs. I have to write another column for next week. And Guru Dutt died 55 years ago.

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