NEW DELHI – A teenager from a North Indian village who was pulled from a farm and raped by a group of men died of her injuries at a New Delhi hospital on Tuesday, sparking renewed outrage across the country after years of what experts described as gangrape. Epidemic in India.
The 19-year-old woman was rushed to hospital just two weeks before she was gang-raped by men of the highest caste near her village in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras district and raped in two months. , Said his family.
Hathras police chief Vikrant Veer said four people have been arrested on charges of gangrape and murder. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said “strict action” should be taken against the attackers, “Yogi Adityanath, a top elected official from Uttar Pradesh and leader of Shri Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, said on Twitter.
But justice is not possible: National Crime Records Bureau figures show that out of tens of thousands of rape cases reported in India annually, only a handful have been prosecuted. Activists say the true scope of the problem is even worse, as many cases have never been reported in India due to the stigma of sexual violence.
When suspects are prosecuted, it is always consciously applauded in a murder case or by justifiable behavior by police officers, but it also demonstrates the justice system’s inability to deal with sexual violence.
The woman was a Dalit, in the lowest part of the Hindu caste lineage in India. On Tuesday, hundreds of protesters from the Bhim Army, a pro-Dalit party, rushed to a Delhi hospital where the woman was treated and clashed with police.
Bhim Army leader Chandrasekhar Azad urged Dalits across India to take to the streets so that the attackers could be hanged.
According to his brother Satender Kumar, the 19-year-old woman was mowing the lawn in Hathras to feed the family’s five milk buffaloes when she was taken away by a group of upper caste men on September 14, her brother Satender Kumar said.
Mr Kumar said his tongue was cut and his spine was broken, while he was pulled by a rope from his neck. He said he was arrested several days after he lodged a complaint with the police. His sister was initially treated at a hospital in Uttar Pradesh before being shifted to New Delhi.
Shri Adityanath, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Said in another tweet That a special investigation team was formed to investigate the case and a report will be delivered in a week.
After the woman died at a New Delhi hospital, her body was taken back to Uttar Pradesh, where police seized her body early Wednesday morning and conducted the funeral without the family, to try to keep the case quiet, Mr Kumar said.
“They forcibly took away the body, attacked family members and buried my sister the same night.” “The police did not allow us near the cemetery.”
Hathras police did not immediately comment on the family’s allegations. But District Magistrate Praveen Kumar Laxkar told reporters on Wednesday that it was untrue that family members were not allowed at the time of cremation.
Dalit women are particularly vulnerable to gender-based discrimination, and Dalit women are sexually assaulted thousands of times a year, human rights groups say.
Horrific reports of rape, often followed by revenge violence if the victims or their families speak, have become painfully familiar in India. Rape reports are determined by most class and race dynamics in order to obtain national notification.
The shocking gangrape of a student on a bus in New Delhi in 2013, who later died, sparked nationwide protests, with protesters demanding reform. But the country’s highly pressured court system is moving at a slow pace. The four convicts in the 2012 case were hanged at the end of 2019 after their appeals were dismissed.
Police have killed four suspects in the gangrape of a 27-year-old veterinarian last year in the southern state of Hyderabad, prompting Indian justice.
Swati Maliwal, head of the Delhi Mahila Mahila Punch, went on a hunger strike outside Mahatma Gandhi’s mausoleum in New Delhi last year, and demanded that a bill be passed to force the courts to impose the death penalty on rapists within six months of convicting MLAs.
Maliwal said in a public statement on Wednesday that the Hathras case had “embarrassed the entire country” and that he had written a letter to the Chief Justice of India’s Supreme Court seeking “justice for the girl child”.
The death of a teenager this week as the country struggles with the coronavirus epidemic is causing a stir in India. In one case, in the southern state of Kerala, an ambulance driver is accused of raping a Kovid-19 patient while taking him to hospital. In August, the broken body of a 13-year-old man was found in a sugarcane field in Uttar Pradesh, near the Nepal border. In July, a 6-year-old girl was abducted and raped in the southern state of Madhya Pradesh. And suffered serious eye injuries in an attempt to prevent her from identifying her attackers.
According to the latest figures from the Government of India, the police registered 33,6588 cases of rape, an average of 927 per day, an increase of 35 per cent over 2013, when fast-track courts for rape cases were set up. The reported victims are about 10,000 children.
Reported by Hari Kumar from New Delhi and Emily Schmal from Chicago.
