Sushmitha Banerjee: The Escape of an Indian Woman from Taliban Afghans

Taliban, a word that creates unease if we come across it in any situation. Those who are aware of them have fear and resentment. The Taliban is a militant Islamic group whose ruling is intolerant of the natives. "Because of the Taliban, Afghanistan has become a jail for women. We haven't got any human rights. We don’t have the right to go outside, to work, to look after our children," says Faranos Nazir, a 34-year-old woman in Kabul. That is the actual scenario of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban. A single Indian woman writer lightened on the life of women in Afghanistan through her books, who is none other than Sushmitha Banerjee.

Source: Firstpost The silent warrior Sushmitha Banerjee

In 1956, a Bengali Brahmin couple was blessed with a baby girl, in the region of Kolkata. The father was working in the civil defense department and the mother was a homemaker. The couple named the girl Sushmitha Banerjee. The little girl was well brought up along with her three brothers. After around three decades, fate brought her across an Afghan businessman Janbaz Khan, at a theater rehearsal in Kolkata. Love bloomed between them. But she feared that her parents would disagree with their marriage and got married secretly in 1988. When her parents came to know about this, they forced her to divorce her husband. This pressure-induced her to move to Afghanistan with her husband.

Upon entering Afghanistan, her life was not a cakewalk. Not only to her but to all the women in Afghanistan. Reality and life in Afghanistan broke her down as it was unimaginably worse under Taliban rule. She was taken aback, when she discovered that she was not the first wife of her husband but his second wife and that her husband had gotten married to another woman, Gulguti about ten years back. Adding fuel to fire, women were not permitted to step outside the house without a male relative and weren’t allowed to talk to other men. Hospital visits too were not an option for women as other male doctors might have to touch them. So, the value of a woman’s life is just as worthless as a mere fragment of a paper for them.

She realized this only when her brother-in-law’s wife lost her life while giving birth to her eighth son. Her in-laws were busy celebrating the son's birth, rather than mourning on her death due to lack of professional treatment. She got to understand the availability of unqualified doctors and the lack of medical facilities and took a decisive step of learning medicine as a trained nurse, she started a dispensary in her house in the provinces of Paktika where she also had a well-sanitized in-house delivery. She helped a lot of women and children with her correct and better-quality medications and when the Taliban came to know about a woman running a clinic, they beat her black and blue.

This outraged her and decided to go back to India with her husband but was stopped by the Taliban. Her husband abandoned her and the in-laws snatched her daughter, Tinni from Sushmitha. She survived on her own as a doctor in the houses of the villagers. After six years, she decided to escape for the first time. She successfully took a jeep and reached Pakistan and the Indian and Afghanistan embassies where she had been cheated and handed back to the Taliban. Again, with the unbearable atrocities she ran all night to escape and this time she was caught by members of the Taliban. A fatwa was issued against her and she was scheduled to die on July 22, 1995.

“I have always been a fighter. Dranai chacha, the village headman, helped me with my third attempt. The Taliban had killed his son so he turned against them. On the day I was to escape, I grabbed an AK-47 (which decorates most houses in Afghanistan) and shot three Taliban.”

-Sushmitha Banerjee

Fearing the loss of her life, she tried to escape again. This time, it was a successful attempt with the help of a village headman, Dranai Chacha whose son was killed by the Taliban. He drove her to Kabul, got a visa and passport, and fortunately landed in her mother country, India in 1995. She then lived here till 2013 and in the meantime, she wrote books on Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou ("A Kabuliwala's Bengali Wife'') in 1995. In 2003, Escape from Taliban, her book was adapted into a Bollywood film, starring Manisha Koirala. She authored Talibani Atyachar—Deshe o Bideshe (Taliban atrocities in Afghanistan and Abroad), Mullah Omar, Taliban O Ami (Mullah Omar, Taliban, and I) (2000), Ek Borno Mithya Noi (Not a Word is a Lie) (2001) and Sabhyatar Sesh Punyabani (The Swansong of Civilisation) and released them successfully.

When everything was going well, she now wanted to return to Afghanistan. Some say that she wished to reunite with her husband and daughter and some said that she was already united with her husband and next she wanted to patch up with her daughter. Also, there is another assumption that she wanted to write another book on the lives of Afghan women and hence went back to shoot her lives. Whatever may be the reason, she returned to Afghanistan and that was her last journey.

According to the Afghan police, the Taliban forcefully entered her house and her relatives were tied up and she was abducted. Later she was found dead on the night of September 4, 2013. It was a normal murder but a brutal one. Her hair was pulled out from the scalp and her body was engraved with 20 bullet hole marks. Initially, the group did not admit their murder but later, The Suicide Group of the Islamic Movement of Afghanistan declared, “We killed Sushmita Banerjee because she is an Indian spy…We are against everyone who is engaged against the Afghans, the jihad, and works with the American attackers.” this despite her assertions that she was “a daughter-in-law of all Afghans '. Thus, ends the life of a woman who flew just to live happily and fought for her and all women’s freedom.

Source: Shutterstock Sushmitha Banerjee’s books