Acid attack survivor’s bravery puts issue in spotlight in India

An appearance by a 19-year-old female survivor of an acid attack in India at New York Fashion Week last Friday has shone a light on the continuing easy availability of acid across the country.

Dressed in a floor-length white embroidered gown, Reshma Banoo Qureshi sashayed down the ramp in New York, and was greeted with loud claps and cheers for her bravery.

“I want to tell the world, do not see us in a weak light,” Qureshi told AFP after the show. “Even we [acid victims] can go out and do things. People have a tendency to look at acid attack survivors from one perspective and I don’t want them to look at them like that anymore.”

Two years earlier, acid was hurled into Qureshi’s face in the north Indian city of Allahabad by her sister’s estranged husband, for rejecting his sexual advances. The attack blinded her in one eye and scarred her face and a portion of her body.

It took the teenager two years to overcome the physical and emotional trauma of the attack and to speak out for acid victims at home before braving a world forum like New York Fashion Week.

A few hours earlier, and thousands of miles away, Qureshi’s case and that of thousands of others like her were highlighted by a special women’s court in Mumbai which sentenced Ankur Panwar (25) to death for a fatal acid attack on a woman in the city in 2013.

Preeti Rathi (23) had just arrived in Mumbai as an Indian navy nurse when Panwar attacked her at a railway station for rejecting his marriage proposal.

She died a month later. Soon afterwards, India’s supreme court ordered the countrywide sale of acid to be regulated, imposing strict conditions on its retail.

Officials, however, concede that these measures had failed to curb acid attacks that had only proliferated in recent years.

They said acid was easily available as a majority of the establishments that sell it were in the unorganised sector and provincial municipalities had neither the means nor the manpower to police and monitor them.

There were 500 registered acid attacks in 2015 – up from 349 the previous year. Some 106 cases were reported in 2012, rising to 122 the following year.

Activists concede that many acid attacks went unreported, as police were either unwilling to record them or illiterate victims in rural areas were ignorant of the law and procedures.

Almost all victims of acid attacks were women, assaulted for rejecting the sexual advances of potential suitors, husbands or employers.

Victims of acid attacks face multiple challenges, as large parts of India are not adequately equipped to treat acid burn victims.