The Bharatiya Janata Party has done everything possible to try to cover up the mishandling of gangrape and the murder of a Dalit woman by upper-caste Thakur men in a village in the Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh.
This has included the administration imposing a curfew on the village, light threats to the family from a senior official and attacking opposition leaders. Yet even by these standards, the saffron party hit a new low when on Friday, the head of its powerful IT cell, Amit Malviya, posted a video revealing the identity of the victim.
The graphic video tweeted by Malviya is not only insensitive and factually incorrect in the way he framed the text, it violates Indian law.
According to the Indian Penal Code, revealing the identity of a rape victim is a crime punishable by a jail term of up to two years.
The victim had reported rape in a declaration of death registered before a magistrate on September 22. In addition, the first information report has been presented in an IPC section dealing with gangrape.
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In the video, the victim can be seen in shock, stating that she was strangled for resisting the efforts of “zabaradasti” (literally, force) against her. In Hindi, the word “zabaradasti” is often used as a euphemism for sexual assault. She constantly repeated this accusation in another video as well.
However, Malviya misrepresented the content of the video, claiming that she only says that there was an attempt to strangle her. She did not mention her allegations of sexual assault.
This is part of the BJP’s strategy to deny that the woman was raped. The party has pushed this narrative despite the fact that a medico-legal examination report prepared by the Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College Hospital in Aligarh claims that the victim’s vagina had been penetrated by a penis and the use of force.
As the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP should make every effort to investigate the crime. Instead, the BJP has redoubled its backing for Malviya. Priti gandhi, the head of social media BJP Mahila Morcha, came to Malviya’s support on Saturday.
“Can you explain what law is violated if a video of the victim is posted?” Gandhi argued. “No report suggests that she was sexually assaulted. It is just a fiction of the imagination of Lutyen Media. Are we governed by the rule of law or the hallucinations of a few? !! “
Even the National Commission for Women seems to be influenced by this line of thinking. Talking with him Indian express The president of the organization, Rekha Sharma, argued that what Mavliya did was a crime only on the condition that the crime of rape is proven: “If it turns out that she was a victim of rape, then the NCW will take the matter up to her logical ending. “
Both Gandhi and Sharma have misunderstood the law. The law of nondisclosure of a rape victim has nothing to do with proof of the crime. It is activated as soon as legal accusations of sexual assault are made. The identity of a person against whom “the crime of rape is alleged or found to have been committed” cannot be revealed, the law states.
Therefore, there is no doubt that the identity of the woman must be protected.
Despite the fact that the law is so clear, no legal authority has censured Malviya. In fact, two days after she published it, Malviya did not even consider it necessary to delete the video from her social networks.
The Hathras incident has been a wake-up call to how brutal India is when it comes to both women and Dalits. At first, the incident reflected the shocking state of law and order and administrative apathy. If that wasn’t bad enough: there are now active attempts to openly attack the deceased victim by the ruling party of India. Where will this race end to the end?
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