Purnima Shil was twelve years old and serving as her party's polling agent when Bangladesh's 2001 election ended in defeat for the side she represented. Days later, dozens of men descended on her family's home. It took a decade for eleven of them to be sentenced, and her ordeal has since been repurposed by a political campaign far from the village where it happened.
Purnima Shil was a schoolgirl in Purba Delua village, in Ullapara upazila of Sirajganj district in northern Bangladesh, when Bangladesh's Hindu minority and the party she supported both lost badly in the same election. On October 1, 2001, she served as a polling agent for the Awami League, the party her Hindu-majority village had long backed, and she objected in public when activists from the rival Bangladesh Nationalist Party stuffed ballot boxes at her polling center. She was twelve years old, by the account in the most detailed record of her case; some contemporaneous reporting put her at thirteen. Either way, she was a child, and she had just publicly crossed the side that was about to take power.
The BNP, in alliance with the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, won the national election. On October 8, 2001, a week after the vote, between thirty and forty men descended on the Shil family's home in reprisal. They abducted Purnima, took her to an isolated location, and gang-raped her. The attack on her family did not stop there: her sister lost her eyesight in the same assault, and the family's small business, a hair salon, was looted twice in its aftermath. The Shils were eventually forced to abandon Purba Delua altogether. Her father, Anil Chandra Shil, filed a police report at Ullahpara station naming seventeen suspects; four were arrested at the time, but none was prosecuted for years.
Prosecution of the men who attacked Purnima stalled for most of the decade that followed, moving forward only after the Awami League returned to power in the 2008 election. On May 4, 2011, the Sirajganj District Women and Children Repression Prevention Tribunal, with Judge Osman Haidar presiding, convicted eleven men and sentenced each to life imprisonment, along with a fine of 100,000 taka to be paid to Purnima as compensation. Six of the convicted men, all from the same village, were in custody to hear the sentence: Abdul Jalil, Altaf Hossain, Hossain Ali, Abdur Rauf, Yeasin Ali, and Liton Sheikh. The other five had fled and remained at large. Purnima told reporters at the time that the sentence did not go far enough, saying at least two of the men, both from her own village, deserved to be executed rather than imprisoned for life. No published account traces what became of the five men who never faced the tribunal.
She was punished as a child for defending a ballot box, and then, for years afterward, punished again each time her name became useful to someone else's argument.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina personally funded Purnima's education after the attack, and she grew up to become a music tutor in Dhaka. A brief stint working at a television station ended after she resigned amid harassment online, including a fake Facebook profile created to defame her, which the BBC covered under the headline "Shamed again in the age of Facebook" in 2016. In 2018 she served as personal officer to Tarana Halim, then the state minister for information, and in January 2019 she purchased an Awami League nomination form to seek a women's reserved seat in the eleventh Parliament, joining the party's agriculture and cooperative subcommittee. Whether she ultimately held that seat is not confirmed in the public record.
In April 2021, Purnima's case resurfaced far from Sirajganj, when her image and story opened a campaign video for India's Bharatiya Janata Party during the West Bengal state election, presented as a symbol of the treatment of Hindus in Bangladesh. The video used her decade-old suffering to make a political argument in a country's election she had no part in, with no indication she consented to the use. Twenty-five years after the vote she tried to protect as a child, Purnima Shil's name still travels ahead of her, attached each time to someone else's cause.