Woman dies in Delhi after gang rape, fuelling outrage again in India

A teenager 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 Tuesday, triggering nationwide outrage again after years of what experts describe as a gang rape epidemic in India.

The 19-year-old woman, whom Indian law prohibits naming, had been transferred to the hospital just a day before, two weeks after she was gang-raped and mutilated by higher-caste men near their village in the Hathras District in Uttar Pradesh state, her family said.

A man holds a placard during a protest after the death of a rape victim, on a street in Mumbai, India, Sept 30, 2020. REUTERS

The police chief in Hathras, Vikrant Vir, 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, Uttar Pradesh’s top elected official and a leader of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

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.

When action is taken against suspects, it is often by vigilantes or by police officers acting extrajudicially, in killings that are usually widely praised but that also point out the justice system’s inability to deal with rampant sexual violence.

The 19-year-old woman was cutting grass to feed the family’s five milk buffalo in Hathras when she was taken away by a group of upper-caste men on Sept 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. He said that arrests came only after days of complaints to the police.

A demonstrator is detained by police during a protest after the death of a rape victim, on Rajpath near India Gate, in New Delhi, India, Sept 30, 2020. REUTERS

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 Wednesday and took her to be cremated without the family, ostensibly to try to keep the case quiet, Kumar said.

According to the latest Indian government data, the police registered 33,658 cases of rape in 2017 — an average of 92 per day and a 35% jump from 2012, when fast-track courts for rape cases were rolled out. About 10,000 of the reported victims were children.

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