Atul Sharma
Early Times Report
Jammu, Sept 6: A conspiracy of silence that shadowed one of Jammu and Kashmir's most horrifying crimes has begun to unravel, as the Crime Branch on Sunday arrested an 85-year-old self-styled "community leader" accused of bribing the family of a Class 5 tribal girl to shield the school headmaster who allegedly raped her — a crime that ultimately claimed the child's life.
The arrest of Peer Bakash, who wielded considerable clout in Chatroo's tribal belt, has ripped the lid off an alleged village-level cover-up operation — one that investigators say was designed to bury the truth before it ever reached the police.
According to Crime Branch sources, Bakash did not merely stay silent. He allegedly stepped in as a fixer, summoning a shadowy sit-down of "prominent persons" and religious figures with a single agenda: pressure the grieving father into accepting hush money from the very man accused of destroying his daughter's life.
The minor, barely a schoolgirl, had allegedly been sexually exploited repeatedly by her own headmaster — a betrayal of trust inside the walls of a government school meant to protect her. When she became pregnant, the alleged cover-up allegedly escalated. Bakash, police say, browbeat the father into consenting to an illegal abortion, using a toxic mix of bribery and intimidation to make the "problem" disappear quietly.
It didn't disappear. The girl died after allegedly delivering a stillborn child following the botched, illegal termination — turning an act of alleged sexual predation into an alleged case of engineered death.
Bakash's arrest pushes the total number of people held in the case to ten, a list that now includes the accused headmaster himself and two female Health Department employees allegedly complicit in the illegal termination.
The arrest comes as pressure mounts from tribal rights organisations demanding that authorities go after every hand that allegedly tried to smother the case. The Tribal Gujjar Bakarwal Welfare Foundation has sounded the alarm over the safety of the victim's family, alleging they remain vulnerable to intimidation from a network of influential locals.
Foundation Chairman Dr Naseeb Ali, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, didn't mince words in earlier remarks in a statement, alleging that powerful figures in the area used threats and cash to try to silence an economically fragile nomadic family reeling from unimaginable loss.
"The family of the accused persons is influential, and attempts are allegedly being made through threats, pressure or other means to influence the economically vulnerable nomadic family of the deceased child and hush up the matter," Dr Ali said.
The case has now been handed to the Crime Branch for a full-scale probe, after Chatroo Police's initial FIR led to nine arrests in what has been described as one of the most disturbing crimes to hit the Kishtwar tribal belt in recent memory. |