“Not long ago, I stood in your place. I couldn’t live without my husband even a single day, but its been two-and-half-years now. We need to turn ourselves into warriors of social justice,” Gowsalya wrote to Amrutha Varshini.
The young women — one from Tamil Nadu’s Tiruppur and the other in Andhra Pradesh’s Nalgonda — share a tragic bond having seen their husbands brutally killed for the sole reason that they belonged to the Scheduled Castes. Ms. Gowsalya and her husband Shankar were shopping for birthday clothes while Ms. Amruta Varshini and Pranay Kumar were leaving a hospital after her pre-natal check up .
Dressed in a black kurta and jeans, Ms Gowsalya spent almost an hour with Ms. Amrutha Varshini when she visited her on Friday, listening attentively to her relationship, and the incidents that led to her husband Pranay Kumar's killing on September 14.
“My husband too was killed for caste,” Ms. Gowsalya said, showed Ms. Amrutha Varshini the CCTV footage of the March 2016 killing in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruppur, on her phone.
Recalling that she too faced hostility from among friends, relatives and on social media, Ms. Gowsalya urged Ms. Amrutha Varshini stand firm on facts.
“I said ‘no’ to the court more than 50 times, when it sought to grant bail to my parents,” she said. The Tirupur district court had held eight of the 11 accused guilty, and awarded death sentence to six persons including Ms. Gowsalya’s father. “I was controlled, and timid [before the incident]. But now, fighting to ensure punishment to the killers, and to dismantle the caste system is my aim,” she said.
Assuring Ms Amrutha Varshini of all moral and legal support in her quest for justice, Ms. Gowsalya said, “She is courageous. Mostly surrounded by visitors and the media, sometimes she is reading Swami Vivekananda or resting.”
Like Amrutha, Gowsalya is 21 now. A clerk in the Ministry of Defence, she also established the `Shankar Social Justice Trust,’ after her husband, that fights to eradicate caste, help marginalised children get education and ensure gender equality.
“She is better known as Gowsalya Shankar. We couldn’t arrange a dappu, else she would have sang and danced protesting against the caste system,” member of Kula Vivaksha Porata Samithi K. Bhasker said.
