New Delhi: In less than a month after a woman from West Bengal was allegedly raped by two ‘farmer’ protestors at the Tikri border, another case of molestation has been reported from the farmer protest site at the Tikri border.
This comes to light after a social media user named Shivani Dhillon (@shivani_sikh) said that a Punjabi nursing assistant was molested and raped by criminal elements disguised as farmers at the Tikri border protest site, who have blocked highways for months to protest against the three farm laws passed by the Modi government.
Sharing the screenshots of an Instagram post shared by the victim, Dhillon narrated how Dr Swaiman Singh and his followers harassed her at the Tikri border site recently.
The victim narrated her story on Instagram, however she has not yet registered any complaint.
The victim said that after watching videos of Dr Swaiman Singh’s work, she wanted to create awareness about Covid-19 and vaccinations amongst protestors sitting at Tikri Border and hence she decided to volunteer in his organization in April this year.
As she came to the Tikri border, she was given a room with women protestors from a village at the end of the corridor in the building of Pind California, a medical centre established by Dr Swaiman Singh at the Tikri protest site.
“In the first few interactions themselves, I felt uneasy with some of the male volunteers, but I brushed it off. I did not interact much with them in these two days except when absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, on the third day, the female doctors and my women roommates had to leave, and I was left alone in the room. There were women protestors still in the other room, and I asked a few of them to sleep in my room as I didn’t want to be left alone,” the nurse, whose identity is yet to be known, said.
She further said, “They weren’t used to woman giving it back to them or listening to ‘No’, and their fragile ego had been shattered to pieces by my actions. Hence the slut-shaming. I thought it would end once I left the protest (and I shudder to think how many more women would have left coz of the rampant sexism, misogyny, and the harassment faced at the hands of these men! inclusive space much?)” the victim shared her story.
Concluding her post, the nurse said that if anyone did not care for morcha, it was Dr Singh and not her. The victim also said that the morcha is not affected by women who speak out the crimes of their perpetrators but by the men who do such things. “And this shame or guilt is not mine to have, but it is the harassers and their enablers who need self-introspection and stop treating us women as a dispensable part of this protest and society in general,” she said.
