- Thursday, April 25, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
TWELVE people were arrested in India, including eight women and three minor boys, on charges of sexually assaulting and parading a young woman in the streets of New Delhi.
On Tuesday (1), the police told Al Jazeera that the three minors were accused of assaulting the woman, in her 20s, in a neighbourhood in the city’s eastern part as India observed its Republic Day on January 26.
The cops said the young woman was allegedly gang-raped, her hair chopped off by the women of the house where she was targeted and her face was blackened.
A video of the attack which went viral on social media showed the woman getting brutally slapped and kicked by the women as others cheered.
The attack continued for several minutes and the woman was found pleading for mercy with folded hands.
After she was beaten up, the woman was dragged out of the house and paraded in the vicinity with a garland of discarded shoes hung around her neck. People were also seen watching the assault right before the victim’s paternal house.
She was later rescued by police.
“She is in a government shelter home. We are providing security to her family,” senior police official R Sathiyasundaram told Al Jazeera in a telephonic talk.
According to local media reports, the attack happened because the woman, mother of a three-year-old child, had repeatedly rejected the advances of a teenage boy who lived next to her parent’s house in Delhi’s Kasturba Nagar area.
The teenage boy’s family said he committed suicide following the rejection last November and his death fuelled the “revenge attack”.
“The boy committed suicide in November last year and his family is now blaming the victim. They have alleged it was because of her that he took the extreme step. To exact revenge on her, they allegedly abducted her. They wanted to teach her a lesson,” several media reports quoted a senior police official as saying last week.
The woman’s sister, whose identity was not revealed because of legal reasons, told a local news website that the teen who died had “fallen in love” with the victim. “He used to keep calling and asking her to leave her husband and be with him. She would always refuse,” she told newslaundry.com.
She said her sister was abducted on January 26 morning by four men from outside her husband’s house in Karkardooma area of New Delhi, a 10-minute drive from the teen’s home in Kasturba Nagar where she was taken and tortured.
The incident has caused outrage in India, which has been known to be a “dangerous place” for women.
Kavita Krishnan, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and a noted feminist, told Al Jazeera, “The stripping and parading, face-blackening are shameful practices of caste-based atrocities against persons of oppressed castes.”
“In the Kasturba Nagar incident, though both the accused and the victim are from the same community, the gender atrocity used the practices learned from caste atrocities. This is very much a gender atrocity where an entire neighbourhood thinks it is OK to lynch a woman because she did not reciprocate love for a man.”
Several other politicians, including Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and former Indian National Congress president Rahul Gandhi have condemned the incident and sought justice.
Kejriwal said the incident was “very shameful” and appealed to India’s Narendra Modi-led federal government which controls the Delhi Police to take strict action against the accused.
“How did the criminals get so much courage?” Kejriwal tweeted. “Delhiites will not tolerate such heinous crime and criminals at any cost.”
Gandhi on Monday said on Twitter that the video of the alleged gang-rape victim being brutally beaten up “exposes a very disturbing face of our society”.
“The bitter truth is that many Indians don’t consider women to be human,” he tweeted. “This shameful fact needs to be acknowledged and called out.”
New Delhi is often dubbed by the media as India’s “rape capital”.
In December 2012, a student was brutally gang-raped in a moving bus and subsequently died of her grave injuries. The incident sparked a massive outrage that saw India’s criminal laws amended to pave way for a death sentence in certain instances of rape.
However, not much has changed on the ground despite the move.
In 2020, more than 28,000 cases of rape were reported across India, an average of 77 in a day, according to a report by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
In September last year, NCRB data showed that more than 370,000 cases of crimes against women were reported in the country in the previous year.
Experts believe the real figures are even higher as many such cases are not reported due to fear or shame or both.
