She has been physically assaulted 17 times. Someone tried to fling acid on her face. Another time a van deliberately rammed the auto rickshaw she was riding. They have tried to poison her. In 2012 a mob tried to attack one of her centres. But Sunitha Krishnan is not afraid. She says that these assaults have only steeled her resolve to carry on her crusade against human trafficking.
Sunitha Krishnan was born in 1972 in Bangalore to Malayali parents who were from Palakkad in Kerala. Since her father worked in the Department of Survey that makes maps for the entire country, he was frequently transferred. So, Sunitha and her family had to move to different places as she grew up.
But she was constantly thinking of others. When she was just eight years old, she started teaching dance to mentally challenged children. Before she was twelve, she was running schools in slums for the poor slum children. At the age of fifteen, while working on a neo-literacy campaign for the Dalit community, Sunitha was gang raped by eight men. They did not like the changes she tried to usher into their society. The violent beating that she suffered that day made her partially deaf in one ear.
“Suddenly my life changed. I was pure and then I went down, in terms of becoming the most cursed human being and the most dishonored person. Everything I had been I was no longer. I saw another world, where my family cursed my existence and parents would tell their children not to talk to me because I would be a bad influence…My eyes opened to the world of reality. That is when my gods were giving me signs of where I should be and who I should be with. I was accused of a crime I didn’t commit; I was blamed for something I had never done, I was shamed and made to feel guilty for something I was not responsible. All that triggered an anger that drove me then and still drives me today,” says Sunitha.
FR M A JOE ANTONY SJ
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