Wed 30 September 2020:
With her tongue chopped off and severe injuries in her spinal cord
A 20-year-old woman, who died on Tuesday in Delhi two weeks after she was gang-raped and tortured in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras, was cremated by policemen last night, allegedly as her family and relatives were locked up in their homes.
A disturbing sequence of events captured in overnight visuals shows the family arguing with cops, female relatives throwing themselves on the hood of the ambulance carrying the body and a mother weeping helplessly as cops insist on taking her daughter straight to cremation, without allowing a last look.
Protests have erupted in India over the death of a young woman two weeks after she was dragged from a field and allegedly gang-raped and tortured.
The 20-year-old was attacked while she was out cutting grass on 14 September in Hathras, a district in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The attackers allegedly pulled her into a field with her shawl, sexually assaulted her and tried to strangle her.
With her tongue chopped off and severe injuries in her spinal cord, the young victim was first admitted to a nearby hospital and later shifted to Safdarjung Hospital, a government-run tertiary care hospital, in Delhi a couple of days ago.
The news of the victim’s death shocked everyone with activists and ministers demanding justice on social media.
The woman’s body was taken to her village in Hathras, about 200 km from Delhi, after midnight. As her family and villagers suspected the UP police wanted to complete the last rites right then, in the middle of the night, they insisted that this was “against their tradition”; the woman’s father pleaded with the police to be allowed to take her home and cremate her in the morning.
ABSOLUTELY UNBELIEVABLE – Right behind me is the body of #HathrasCase victim burning. Police barricaded the family inside their home and burnt the body without letting anybody know. When we questioned the police, this is what they did. pic.twitter.com/0VgfQGjjfb
— Tanushree Pandey (@TanushreePande) September 29, 2020
“We wanted the last rites to be performed according to the Hindu traditions. Despite our protests, the cremation was performed. They took the body forcefully. We couldn’t see our daughter’s face for the last time,” the woman’s father told NDTV.
“The gang rape and torture victim breathed her last today. My tribute to her. This current government is totally insensitive to the crimes against women,” Akhilesh Yadav, former chief minister of the state, wrote on Twitter.
#Hathras gangrape case: Protest erupts. Capital punishment is what the protesters are asking for, outside #Safdarjung Hospital. @TanushreePande shares more details.#ITVideo pic.twitter.com/0cZKBHwcTk
— IndiaToday (@IndiaToday) September 29, 2020
Another former chief minister of the state, Mayawati, also tweeted that the government should take strict actions against the accused and prosecute them in fast-track courts.
“We demand justice for our daughter and request the government to hang the culprits,” said Om Prakash, father of the victim.
He further added that the victim had gone to the nearby fields with her mother and brother when the accused grabbed and dragged her.
All four suspects have been arrested by the local police. The key accused – Sandeep — was arrested five days after the incident on the victim’s brother’s complaint. Another three were arrested after the victim’s statement on Sept. 22.
According to the family, the police had at first accused the woman of lying about her injuries. The police had initially registered an attempted murder case but added rape charges only after the woman’s formal statement a week after the incident, when she was able to speak.
Yesterday, a senior officer said rape had not been confirmed and they were waiting for a forensic report.
Sexual violence in India
“The horrific gang rape and death of this young Dalit woman once again demonstrates the close relationship between sexual violence and India’s discriminatory caste system,” said Divya Srinivasan, south Asia consultant for women’s rights organisation Equality Now.
Srinivasan said that despite repeated flare-ups of outrage in India in response to cases of extreme sexual violence and cruelty, still “nothing is addressed at the grassroots”.
“It is time that India’s government and criminal justice system step up to start effectively dealing with the epidemic of sexual and gender-based violence being inflicted on Dalit women and girls,” she said.
India remains the most dangerous country in the world in which to be a woman. In 2012 protests erupted across the country following the fatal gang-rape of a woman on a bus in Delhi, and last year there was more unrest after the rape and murder of a young vet in Hyderabad.
The introduction of harsher penalties for rape and sexual assault has done little to curb the attacks.
