Mumbai: Rape has been used the world over as an instrument of oppression. It is an exercise and demonstration of power that the rich and powerful have over the weak and poor, of the upper castes over the lower castes; of the entitled royalty over their subjects.
A peculiar aspect of the deep rooted caste system in our country is that a person from the upper caste will not have water served to him by the lower castes, or allow their shadow to cross his path; He will not allow a person from the lower caste to walk on the same side of the street or draw water from the same well. But he has no hesitation whatsoever in inserting himself in the lower caste woman.
In exercise of his power might and right!
Dalits — formerly known as “untouchables” — are particularly vulnerable to caste-based discrimination, and Dalit women are singled out for sexual attacks thousands of times a year, according to human rights organizations.
Gruesome reports of rape, often followed by retaliatory violence if victims or their families speak out, have become painfully familiar in India. Whether a rape report rises above the din to receive national notice is often determined by class and caste dynamics.
A 19 year old woman from a north Indian village who was reported to have been dragged from a field and raped by a group of men died of her injuries at a hospital in New Delhi on September 29 triggering nationwide outrage again after years of what experts describe as a gang rape epidemic in India.
The Dalit woman was cutting grass to feed the family’s five milk buffalo in their village in the Hathras district in Uttar Pradesh state when she was taken away by a group of upper-caste men on September 14, according to her brother, Satender Kumar.
Her tongue was cut and her spinal cord was broken after she was dragged by her neck with a rope, Kumar said. She had been transferred to the hospital two weeks after she was gang-raped and mutilated by higher caste men. He said that arrests came only after days of complaints to the police. His sister was initially treated at a hospital in Uttar Pradesh before being transferred to New Delhi.
After the woman died in the hospital in New Delhi, her body was taken back to Uttar Pradesh, where the police seized her body in the early hours September 30 and took her to be cremated without the family, ostensibly to try to keep the case quiet, Kumar said.
“They took the body by force, assaulted the family members, and cremated my sister in the night itself,” her brother said. “Police did not allow us near the cremation place.”
The Hathras police did not immediately comment on the family’s accusations. But the district magistrate, Praveen Kumar Laxkar, told reporters on Wednesday that it was untrue that family members were not allowed at the cremation.
Hundreds of protesters from the Bhim Army, a party advocating for the rights of Dalits, thronged the Delhi hospital where the woman was treated and clashed with the police. A leader of the Bhim Army, Chandrashekhar Azad, urged Dalits across India to take to the streets to demand that the attackers be hanged.
The police chief in Hathras said that four men had been arrested on charges of gang rape and murder. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that “strictest action” should be taken against the attackers, according to a Twitter post by Yogi Adityanath, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and a top elected official and a leader of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and in another tweet he said that a special investigative team had been formed to take on the case and that a report would be delivered within a week.
But justice is unlikely: Of the tens of thousands of rape cases reported in India annually, only a handful result in prosecutions, National Crime Records Bureau figures show. Activists say the true scope of the problem is far worse, as many cases are never reported because of the stigma of sexual violence in India.
When action is taken against suspects, it is often by vigilantes or by police officers acting extra judicially, in killings that are usually widely praised but that also point out the justice system’s inability to deal with rampant sexual violence.
A student’s shocking gang rape aboard a bus in New Delhi in December 2012, which later resulted in her death, galvanized a nationwide protest, with demonstrators clamoring for reform. But the country’s overburdened court system continues to move slowly. Four men convicted in the 2012 case were hanged in late 2019, after exhausting their appeals.
The police killing of four suspects in the alleged gang-rape of a 27-year-old veterinarian last year in the southern state of Hyderabad was widely cheered as a swift workaround to Indian justice.
The Dalit woman’s death this week followed a string of disturbing rape reports in India as the country struggles with the coronavirus pandemic. In one case, in the southern state of Kerala, an ambulance driver is accused of raping a Covid-19 patient while taking her to the hospital. In August, the mutilated body of a 13-year-old was found in a sugar cane field in Uttar Pradesh, near the border with Nepal. In July, a 6-year-old girl was kidnapped and raped in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, and her eyes were severely injured in an attempt to keep her from identifying her attackers.
The virus in our politics is more grievous than the virus in our bodies that harm the entire system. Cover up! Cover up! Cover up! Everywhere till the truth is buried. Everything and anything becomes right with the powerful and the mighty in the country ……..Men in uniform has no respect even for a dead body and the family members of the dead. A laughing stock in front of the world. Let’s condemn the horrifying act and hope for justice.