Bulandshahr: India girls who wrote letter with blood get justice

Six many years after an Indian teen wrote a letter with her own blood seeking justice for her mother who had been burnt alive, the particular murderer has been penalized.

Based on the eyewitness accounts of Latika Bansal – now 21 – and her younger cousin, a court sent their father Manoj Bansal to jail for life.

The girls told the court that will their father utilized to beat up their mom for “not giving birth to a son”.

Bansal denied the accusations and said their wife had passed away by suicide.

In the order pronounced on Wednesday, the court in Bulandshahr town in the northern condition of Uttar Pradesh agreed that Bansal was guilty of eliminating his wife to get “not giving birth to a son”.

India’s preference for sons is rooted in a widely-held cultural perception that a male child would carry forwards the family legacy and look after the parents in their old age, while children would cost all of them dowries and keep them for their matrimonial homes.

This perception, campaigners say, is usually behind the overlook and poor treatment of the girl child plus India’s dramatically skewed sex ratio — caused by elimination of tens of millions of women foetuses through sex-selective abortions, known as woman foeticide.

During the trial, the Bansal sisters recounted in courtroom how they had grown up seeing their dad and his family frequently taunt and strike their mother Anu Bansal for giving birth only to daughters.

The court furthermore heard that Anu had been forced to go through six abortions right after illegal sex perseverance tests showed that she was pregnant with a girl child.

The sister said their life changed on the morning of 14 June 2016 when their dad – allegedly backed by his family members who deny the charges against all of them – doused their mother with kerosene and set her burning down.

“At 6: 30am, we were woken upward by the cries of our mother. We could not help her because the door of our space was locked externally. We watched her burn, ” the girls said in their testimony in the trial court.

Latika said right after their calls towards the local police and ambulance services had been ignored, they called their maternal uncle and grandmother who quickly arrived plus took their mom to the hospital.

Based on doctors who treated her, Anu Bansal had received 80% burns. She died a few days later within hospital.

Their case came into the spotlight only after the girls – then 15 and 11 — wrote a letter with their own blood to then key minister Akhilesh Yadav, accusing the local law enforcement official of changing the murder case to that of suicide.

The local police investigator was then suspended for not doing proper investigation and Mr Yadav ordered senior law enforcement and administration officials to supervise the situation.

“It’s taken us six yrs, one month and 13 days to lastly get justice, inch Sanjay Sharma, the particular lawyer who symbolized the sisters in court, told the BBC.

“This is a rare example of daughters going after a case against their own father and finally obtaining justice, ” he or she said, adding that over the past six many years, the girls appeared within court “more compared to 100 times” and “never missed just one date”.

Mr Sharma added that he failed to charge any money in the family as they had been financially weak and also because he wanted to provide attention to an interpersonal issue.

“This is not just a murder of the woman. This is a crime against society, ” he told me. “It’s not in a female’s hands to decide a child’s gender so why should she become tortured and penalized? This is evil. inch