By D N Singh
At 16, Manini Bisoyi had not heard of an acid attack was. A few days earlier, when a jilted lover told her that he would “destroy her life in the worst possible way such that she could never do anything with her life,” she never expected him to barge into her home and pour a bottle of acid on her face.
For a whole night she was left without any medical help and when her people came there was a perplexing shock in every face.
Today Manini is one of the principal members of the seven acid attack victims, drawn from many states, of the proud Sheroes Hangout, a café in Noida which has slowly become a popular food joint run by the seven only.
A shockingly incomprehensible crime has taken place in Andhra Pradesh where a youth has poured acid into the mouth of a minor girl when she refused to surrender before his lust. Not that alone when she screamed for help, the accused slit her throat to silence her. A bestial act that no law of the land should condone.
70 cases of acid attack were reported between 2011-2019 in Odisha. On an average 8 to nine incidents of acid attack in Odisha each year is in no way a statistics that could be comprehended .
Frustration & Infatuation
Frustrations in love or one sided love have often being the reason behind such crimes when the men resort to a horrendous act like acid attacks, reducing the victims to subjects of pity where majority of them choose hiding their faces in order to escape embarrassment that manifest in different ways.
Once one is disfigured by acid, life takes almost a U-turn and the future of a victim get blazed by fear and inferiority complex. No self-righteous woman prefers sympathy to self respect and why talking about acid attack survivors.
Once the crime is committed then the victim is left in a world where she feels her feet underneath slithering away every now and then.
She knows she cannot be the same again and this self-rejection often lead the victims to take extreme steps.
It has been recorded by the National Crime Records Bureau(NCRB) that the percentage of acid attack survivors is more in North (about 44%) while it is about 27% in East.
Rehabs Are Far & Few In-between
Organisations to support them through respectable rehabilitation are very few and, instances when the survivors become self reliant are fewer.
Like the one in NCR’s Noida region, the Sheroes Hangout , a café open by seven acid attack survivors are rare or the only. Although the Sheroes Hangout by now has succeeded to overcome the conceptual barriers like people unwilling to see a disfigured face smiling or serving dishes but, time has slowly changed and the Hangout seems joining the league of mainstream cafes in the city.
Although there are a few campaigns launched by ISD to raise funds for acid attack survivors lead by Odisha’s one survivor Pramodini Rout, but there is an urgent need of law enforcement and exemplary punishment for such perpetrators or criminals not to skip the bounds of law for years.
