The Hathras woman’s family filed three lawsuits with the Allahabad High Court.
Lucknow:
The family of a young woman who died last month after her torture and alleged gang rape in a village in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, has called for the case to be moved out of state. According to the family’s lawyer, this was one of three lawsuits filed with the Allahabad High Court, which heard the case on Monday.
“The family wants the case to be transferred to Delhi or Mumbai,” lawyer Seema Kushwaha told reporters, according to the Press Trust of India.
He also said that the family had urged the court not to make the investigation reports public.
The case will be heard again on November 2. The family later told reporters that they would not submerge the woman’s ashes until justice was served.
At the hearing, the Uttar Pradesh police and administration were faced with tough questions about how they handled the case and in the middle of the night the cremation of the 20-year-old, who died from horrific injuries from the assault. of four upper caste men from her village on September 14. The investigation has been taken over by the CBI, which visited the village on Sunday and returned after collecting some documents.
The family, among the few Dalits in their village, received protection in the village after they complained of intimidation by the upper caste Thakurs. In court yesterday they asked for more security, claiming they felt unsafe.
The district administration justified the cremation of the woman in the absence of her family; her parents and siblings had been locked in her home when they cremated her at 2.30 am. Police refused to hand over the body despite her parents begging to take her home one last time and hold her funeral the next morning.
Hathras District Magistrate Praveen Kumar Laxar said “there was no pressure from the state government” to carry out the cremation in this way, implying that the local authorities made the controversial decision. He said the police had reasons to take the step for the sake of law and order, an argument that was questioned by the family.
The court questioned whether the case would have been treated differently if the woman, instead of belonging to a poor family, came from a rich one.
“The court asked the district magistrate: ‘What if it was a girl from a wealthy family? Would he have cremated her in the same way?” Seema Kushwaha told NDTV.
The higher court had summoned senior officials from the UP administration and police, as well as the victim’s family, and took over the case on October 1 amid national outrage over the assault by the UP. woman, her death and the way she was cremated.
The woman’s parents and her three brothers traveled to Lucknow under heavy security for the court hearing.
(With PTI inputs)
.
