Crime as punishment

A 22-year-old woman has been gang-raped by 13 men on the orders of village elders in a tribal village in West Bengal's Birbhum district.

The elders meted out the rape as the punishment for the woman’s involvement with a man from another community.

Police has now arrested the thirteen men of Subalpur village who have been accused of the gang-rape.

“It’s horrific. They (rapists) are all our neighbours and I call some of them as kaka (uncle) and some others as dada (elder brother) or bhai (brother),” police said quoting the gang-raped woman.

The elders, who form what is known locally as “Salishi Sabha” (Grievance Committee), meted out the punishment under what they describe as tribal custom but which has no sanction in law.

Such illegal ‘kangaroo’ courts in several parts of rural India have often been conservative and brutal in dealing with anyone who defies traditions and customs.

The gang-rape happened after a man from another community was seen at the woman’s house.

The village chief and his associates reportedly asked them to pay a fine of Rs 25,000 ($400) each for the “indiscretion”.

While the man was able to pay the fine, the woman’s family was unable to do so.

The woman, on the orders of the kangaroo court, was forcibly taken away and reportedly raped through the night before being sent back home the next morning.

The family complained to the police who arrested the 13 and then helped the girl to hospital in a critical condition.

"Prima facie, she was gang-raped and we have rounded up 13 persons," Prashanta Chowdhury, Assistant Superintendent of Police, said.

Some four years earlier, in a similar incident, a young tribal girl was paraded naked in the same district for her alleged affair with a boy from a different community, again sparking huge protests.

West Bengal witnessed huge furore after a woman was raped twice by the same gang and then set on fire on the outskirts of Kolkata.

The state, under the rule of Trinamool Congress, an offshoot of the Congress, has been in the spotlight for a series of rapes in the last two years. West Bengal topped states in crimes against women in 2011 and 2012, reports said, quoting data from the National Crime Records Bureau.