“At 7 am, we received the call. We want justice. The accused must not be saved, ”his brother told TOI on Tuesday morning. When she was first hospitalized, her spinal cord was seriously injured. Doctors discovered that she was paralyzed, her arms partially numb and her tongue severely cut. A week later, she told the police that she had been dragged by the dupatta Four men from her village threw her by the neck into a field, gang-raped her and left her there with a warning not to tell anyone, or her family would be “shot to death”.
She had been on life support. Her doctors said the urgently needed surgery to repair her spine was not possible until her condition improved. She never did. “Severe spinal cord injuries due to strangulation resulted in heart and lung failure,” Safdarjung PRO said Tuesday.
The girl’s sister-in-law said she could have survived if she had been treated better. “I needed good treatment and punctuality. For almost a week since she was admitted (to the Aligarh hospital), she was not properly cared for ”. Saying that politicians’ statements that they “understand the pain of the family” mean nothing, she added: “We did not get support because of our identity. We want the four accused to be punished. ”
In response, Dr. Fakhrul Hoda, head of neurosurgery at JN Medical College in Aligarh, told TOI: “She was transferred to the neuro ICU on the third day of admission … district administration and senior police officials had also asked the family to transfer her to Delhi earlier. There were no lapses in her treatment here. ”
The four men he had named, Ravi Singh (35), Ramu Singh (26), Sandeep (20) and Lavkush (19), had previously been arrested on charges of gang rape, attempted murder and sections of the Law. SC / ST. . “With his death, Section 302 (assassination) of the IPC will be added to the FIR,” said SP Prakash Kumar, additional from Hathras.
The family has a small dairy in the village. The girl, the youngest of five siblings, was helping her mother gather fodder for cattle when she was attacked. Her 46-year-old mother knew she had been raped but did not dare to speak out for fear of reprisals, her brother had told TOI: “I was afraid of the stigma and because they were all from the dominant caste”.
Much has changed in rural India in recent years. What continues is violence against women and atrocities against Dalits. In this case, the two overlap. NCRB data shows 3.8 lakh of crimes against women, including nearly 34,000 rapes in 2018. Nearly 43,000 crimes were committed against SC / ST, including nearly 3,000 rapes in the same year. Despite stricter laws and heightened social awareness, the persistence of such crimes with disgusting regularity underlines once again that the law is only as effective as its enforcement. Speedy trials and better investigation to ensure higher conviction rates are the need of the moment.
This was not the first conflict they had been in at the center. In 2001, ASP Kumar told TOI, the girl’s grandfather had filed a complaint against the relatives of two of the defendants, Sandeep and Ravi, on the basis of which an FIR had been filed under sections 323 (causing harm voluntarily), 504 (intentional insult intended to cause breach of the peace) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC and the SC / ST Act. The case was settled in court 14 years later, in 2015. The town where they live has 60 dominant caste families and only four Valmiki families.
Shortly after the rape allegations came to light, two companies of the Provincial Armed Police were deployed in the village. On Tuesday, police forces from four districts: Agra, Aligarh, Kasganj and Etah, joined them. His body was being released from Safdarjung at the time of this report. Police forces were also deployed to the Gabhana toll plaza after reports that Bhim’s army chief Chandrashekhar Azad would accompany the family from Delhi to Hathras.
The state has awarded Rs 4 lakh compensation to the family, promising another tranche after the rape charges are settled, while the district has awarded Rs 5.9 lakh to the family. In the report of the medical examination, carried out a week after her admission, no evidence of sexual assault was found given the duration that had elapsed. “We are not considering dropping the FIR rape charges until the forensic report arrives,” ADG (Agra area) Ajay Anand told TOI.
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