INDIA’S ONLINE VIGILANTES PURSUE SEXUAL ATTACKERS

[On Friday, it became national news and has prompted Home Minister P. Chidambaram to make a statement. The men in the video are being pursued on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, with their images being spread to hundreds of thousands of people across India.]

By Heather Timmons And Nikhila Gill

A widely circulated video of a teenage girl being attacked and molested by more than a dozen men outside a pub in northeast India has sparked the virtual equivalent of a lynch mob.

Filmed by a journalist for NewsLive, a television station in Assam, who witnessed the attack in Guwahati , the video clearly shows the faces of several of her attackers, who knocked her down, pulled up her T-shirt and groped her for 30 minutes before police arrived.

Local police have identified 12 of the attackers from the video, but had only arrested four by Friday afternoon, news reports said, even though the attack happened on Monday. The main phone in the police station in Guwahati went unanswered Friday afternoon.

The video spread through social media in India in recent days, inspiring an outpouring of outrage at the men involved, the police and the bystanders who didn't help the girl.

On Friday, it became national news and has prompted Home Minister P. Chidambaram to make a statement. The men in the video are being pursued on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, with their images being spread to hundreds of thousands of people across India.

India has a miserable track record when it comes to convicting men accused of sexual assault, with the number of convictions falling in recent years even as the number of women filing complaints has increased. In many cases, complaints about molestations like those caught on video are not pursued by the police, and young women readily admit they resort to violence to keep sexual predators at bay.

Perhaps that explains the public outrage over the Guwahati attack, and the vigilante style pursuit of the attackers. Supporters say that public shame is useful to fight crime.

"The history of crime across the world shows that public shame is a very potent weapon," said Hindol Sengupta, who started FightBack, which maps sexual assaults across Delhi. "Yes, there are privacy issues with sharing information on social media," he said. "That said, people should be publicly held responsible for their actions."

A picture was circulated on Twitter on Friday with head shots of the men from the video, which was sent to hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions of people, accompanied by calls for their arrest.

"Here are some the 'culprits' of humanity. Find em and put them behind bars," read one post by @Janlokpal, the Twitter feed of Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement, which also encouraged its more than 200,000 followers to spread the word.

On YouTube, one user claimed to have located the Facebook page for one of the men and pointed viewers to it.

Outrage has also spread beyond the virtual realm: A billboard appeared in Guwahati with pictures of several of the men in the video, which read "Identify these men who have maligned Assamese society."

National television networks jumped in as well. "Guwahati's shame: Mob molests girl - help identify the culprits," NDTV said, asking readers to e-mail if they had details about the men.

Some legal experts decried the mob mentality,  while others called it necessary given India's weak justice system.

"Circulating a video such as this on a public platform is incorrect," said Siddhartha Shah of Siddhartha Shah & Associates, a Mumbai law firm that handles criminal cases. "The correct way to go about it would have been to hand over the video to the police, who would then authenticate the video and decide whether it was evidence in the case."

While social media can be helpful in exposing problems, it can be harmful because it exposes the victim's identity, putting her in jeopardy, he added. (In the publicly circulated video from Guwahati, the girl's face was blurred out on YouTube and most news channels.)

Others said the public dissemination of the video, and the public shame, could be helpful in enforcing the law.

"Social media acts as social awakening," said Kiran Bedi, an activist and former Indian Police Service officer. Police consequently "come under a scanner and have no choice but to perform," she said.

There is nothing barring such a video from being admitted in a court as evidence, she said. The only impact it might have on the legal process is to make one tool of evidence irrelevant, she said - the identification parade.

"India is a continent with a very weak criminal justice system," Ms. Bedi said. "It has no fear of law left."

Neha Thirani contributed reporting to this post from Mumbai.

 @ The New York Times

VIOLENCE IN THE MALDIVES AS PROTESTS CONTINUE

["Every night the former president is calling out a mob on the streets," said Abbas Adil Riza, a spokesman at the president's office. "He wants a political deal to escape punishment for crimes he committed during his tenure."] 

By Sruthi Gottipati

Before the protest on Thursday, 91 people had been arrested this week. Along with Thursday's arrests, 69 people are still in custody, according to the police.

The police say they've made arrests because the protests weren't peaceful.

"Every day they've been throwing chili powder and crude oil packets at police," said a police spokesman, Hassan Haneef, adding that protesters had also been assaulting police, breaking through security barricades and damaging storefronts.

A police station on one of the islands, Noonu Atoll Holhudhoo, was also torched early Thursday morning, Mr. Haneef said.

The current administration is critical of the protests.

"Every night the former president is calling out a mob on the streets," said Abbas Adil Riza, a spokesman at the president's office. "He wants a political deal to escape punishment for crimes he committed during his tenure."

The police reported that nine officers were injured in Male, two critically. Protesters also torched a police motorbike and van Thursday night, Mr. Haneef said, and a car belonging to the minister of gender, family and human rights, Uza Fathimath Dhiyana Saeed, was damaged on Wednesday.

Ms. Butenis, the U.S. ambassador, said she was alarmed at the recent reports of violence. "Intimidation of protesters, and in particular attacks on journalists, threaten Maldivians' freedom of expression and their right to information, and only contribute to instability," she said.

Mr. Nasheed, the former president, said Friday through his Twitter feed that the Maldives' security forces were publicly threatening to attack a minister of his political party. He also called for the international community to urge the police to show restraint.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, which is in New York, has reported that at least four journalists have been attacked by protesters and the police during the demonstrations in the capital this week. The police said that journalists had been arrested for disrupting police duty but were later released.

@ The New York Times