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The nine-year-old girl prances about in her lawyer’s sprawling office. Dressed in a pink-and-white skirt and top, Helena — allegedly raped on the North Goan beach of Arambol last week — doesn’t know that the incident has rocked Goa. She’s more interested in the games she plays on a red mobile phone.
Like her mother, she understands and speaks very little English. One evening last week, Helena was playing in the water in Arambol — a popular haunt of Russian and Israeli tourists — while mother Ivana, a 34-year-old naturopath, sat on the beach, watching her. Within minutes, the child says, she was molested.
Once again, Goa is being castigated as the “rape capital” of India. And even though the number of rape cases in Goa does not come anyway near those in the bigger states, the fear that such incidents trigger among tourists has kicked up a controversy. The police are sceptical of complaints of rape. But the tourists fear that women are not safe in Goa.
The Scarlet Keeling case has brought Goa the kind of publicity it doesn’t need. Keeling, 15, was a British teenager who was raped and found dead on the Anjuna beach on February 18, 2008. This was followed by another allegation of rape on December 1. The victim this time was a 25-year-old Russian woman.
So is Goa unsafe for women tourists? Locals and tourists stress that it’s not as safe as it used to be. But while the administration tends to blame “skimpily-clad” white women for the rise in sex crimes, the fact remains that even women who are not provocatively dressed get pawed on the streets.
“Rape is committed against a woman who is vulnerable — regardless of the colour of her skin,” says Sabina Martins, a member of the Goan women’s rights group, Bailancho Saad. “The issue of rapes and molestations has been overly hyped by the media and politicians who have their own agenda. There is a lot of voyeuristic tourism in the media coverage, and people are now drawn to beaches to see bikini-clad foreigners.”
Of course, rapes in Goa do get more publicity than those elsewhere. And that’s possibly because Goa has 20 lakh tourists visiting every year — of whom around 5 lakh are foreigners.
According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 20,737 rape cases were reported across India in 2007. Madhya Pradesh topped the chart with 3,010 cases, while Goa reported 20 cases (the police say the figure is much higher — North Goa alone saw 27 reported rape cases in 2009; of these, only three victims over the last three years were foreigners). Delhi, which like Goa is among the smaller territories, reported 598 cases in the same period.
But the arc lights are on Goa, for many of the victims are foreigners. The molesters believe that because the women are often in bikinis, they are “asking” to be raped.
Some say the number of unreported cases of rape in Goa could be much higher — but fear of stigma and police apathy stop women from lodging a complaint. The Russian girl who was allegedly raped by a former local politician, John Fernandes, in Colva in south Goa on December 1, had complained that a Colva police official had forced her to tone down her complaint. It took about a month for Fernandes to be jailed. The girl has since lost her job in a five-star hotel, says her counsel, Vikram Verma.
Even for Ivana, the going was tough when she tried to lodge a complaint.
Ivana, who struggles to string together sentences in English, tells the story of the alleged molestation on January 26. She was approached by a man — identified as Aman Bharadwaj, an employee of a pharmaceutical company in Goa — who sat near her, while his friend, Anil, played with Helena in the water.
After a while, Anil went up to Aman, and the two spoke to each other in a language that Ivana did not follow. Then Anil joined her on the beach, while Aman took to the waters, taking Helena further away from the beach. And then she saw Helena fighting Bharadwaj, who was hugging her tight. A medical report later confirmed “digital penetration of the vulva.”
The police, however, are sceptical of the entire incident. “Why didn’t Ivana scream, go hysterical and alert other tourists on the beach,” asks Bosco George, superintendent of police, North Goa. Ivana says the tourists on the beach were “far away”.
George calls it a case of parental irresponsibility. “The mother could see him fool around with her daughter, but she did not stop him.” He questions why it took her three hours to go to the police.
The victims on the other hand maintain that the police don’t take complaints seriously — a claim dismissed by state chief minister Digambar Kamat. “Even small incidents like someone being touched are reported,” he says. “It is very sad that these incidents should have happened, but there is no problem of safety in the state. Besides, Goans are not committing these acts,” he adds.
On the state website, tourists are advised not to open doors to unsolicited room service or maintenance people or meet strangers in public places such as restaurants.
In December last year, however, Congress MP from Goa Shantaram Naik outraged Parliament when he said that “an alleged rape of a lady who moves with strangers for days together, even beyond middle of the night, is to be treated on a different footing.” Naik was apparently referring to the cases relating to Keeling and the 25-year-old Russian woman.
“I am not for banning bikinis on the beach,” a more subdued Naik now says. “But foreign tourists must be more soberly dressed on and off the beach — though not in suits and saris, of course. They should also be cautious about accepting lifts from strangers and frequenting dark and deserted places,” he says.
To ensure safety on Goa’s beaches, Naik has recommended to the Goa chief minister that the state’s 104-km coastline be manned by the police, with one cop occupying every kilometre of beach space. “But tourists may not like to be watched by the police,” he says.
But as Ivana would say, the police are often the problem to begin with. She says she went to the police outpost in Arambol at 6.30pm. And, she says, she returned to the guest house where she’s staying at 5am the next day.
Meanwhile, life has been stressful for Ivana. “I feel angry with the two men, but I also feel angry with myself. I feel I have been a bad mother. If I had been swimming with my daughter that day, this would not have happened,” she says.
The two accused have now been nabbed and charged with an attempt to rape. “This is not even a rape, as far as I’m concerned,” says George. Nine-year-old Helena may not agree.
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