City’s homeless pet canines to fend off sexual assaulters

Sunil Rastogi, the sexual predator, who used to undertake rape trips to the Capital and molest school children, may have sent shock waves across the Capital.

 However, for many homeless people, fending off sexual assaults is an everyday affair. Many such families have started adopting dogs for the safety of their children.

More than hundred such families who came to the Capital from their native villages in Bihar, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, had to sleep out in the open footpaths as they failed to find a stable livelihood. 

Forty years ago, a family from Maharashtra came to Delhi but missed out on a stable job and were forced to take up odd jobs in Connaught Place’s Baba Kharak Singh Marg. Karan, a homeless person, sits in a somber mood as he makes some stew for his wife and four children. But the favorite member of the family, Rani, a white street dog has already started her meal as she licks off scraps from the ground.

“She has been with our family for the past 15 years. We have been in Delhi for at least 40 years and we have seen people come and go, some of them are murdered, some kidnapped, while others die due to drug abuse. But she stayed with us all this while,” said Yashodha, Karan’s relative.

Karan has a total of six children, out of which two are lodged in a hostel run by a local NGO, four of them remain with him. Clad in rags, the infants peep out of a blanket, while a watchful Yashoda keeps them tucked inside the blanket.

“My children sleep with me. I have no other option as I can’t think of keeping them in a shelter home.  The people who come out there come only for the purpose of sexually assaulting young girls. They abuse women and leer at them. Sometimes they even touch them inappropriately. Out here in the open,  Rani guards us through the night,” said Asha, Karan’s wife.

A few metres away from his family, every homeless family could be seen with a dog tucked under their blankets.  Many of them barely get any food and shelter from the winter but they feed the dogs anyway and sleep with them in their own blankets.

Mangla and her two daughters have been waiting for the local NGO’s to make their identification cards but despite the NGO’s asking her to shift to a shelter home, she refuses. “My husband died a drug addict. I have been looking after my two girls for years. Some time ago, a seven-year-old girl was brutally raped in a shelter home. None of us who sleep out in the open dared to go to a shelter home. The people stay in gangs and will try to sleep beside you and put their hands inside your blouse,” she said.

But with a dog for a companion, she sleeps without worry. “They snuggle into our blankets but we do not mind. They are all about love and are not like the people who treat us with scorn,” she added.