[A crowd of women, members
of the B.J.P., marched on the office of the state’s chief minister on Monday,
refusing to disperse until the authorities turned a water cannon on them. And a
federal security official criticized the state authorities for not applying a
rarely used act that levies severe punishments for acts of violence against
Indians who are from the lowest castes.]
By Betwa
Sharma
 |
|
The
grandmother of two Indian girls who were raped and hanged in
India’s
Uttar Pradesh state.
Credit
Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
|
KATRA SAADATGANJ, India — Sohan
Lal reached the police outpost at 11 o’clock on the night his daughter
disappeared, he said, already desperate for help. He bent down before the
officer in charge and clutched his feet, telling him to hurry, hurry.
“I was on my knees
begging them to come quickly, but they would not take us seriously,” Mr. Lal,
50, said. He said the policemen responded with “foul language” about his caste
and his daughter.
Mr. Lal found his
daughter, 12, close to dawn. She and her cousin, who was 14, had been raped,
and their bodies were hanging by their scarves from a mango tree in this
village about 200 miles from Delhi, the Indian capital.
Relatives insisted that
the bodies hang there for 12 hours, preventing the police from bringing them
down, because they wanted outsiders to see how the girls had been found.
The gruesome deaths have
incited outrage in India and fury against the state government, which is led by
a rival to the newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party.
A crowd of women, members
of the B.J.P., marched on the office of the state’s chief minister on Monday,
refusing to disperse until the authorities turned a water cannon on them. And a
federal security official criticized the state authorities for not applying a
rarely used act that levies severe punishments for acts of violence against
Indians who are from the lowest castes.
“It was a clear case of
atrocity on a weaker section of the society; we do not know why the state
government has not slapped it on them,” Kiren Rijiju, the junior minister for
internal security, was quoted as saying by The Press Trust of India.
Mr. Lal said that last
Tuesday evening, the girls were on their way to find a place to go to the
toilet when they were forcibly led away by three brothers. The accused — Pappu
Yadav, Awadhesh Yadav and Urvesh Yadav — come from the same caste as the three
policemen whom Mr. Lal begged for help that night.
At one point, Mr. Lal
said, the police brought the brothers to the station for an interrogation. One
of them, after having been beaten, admitted to holding the girls captive, Mr.
Lal said, but the other two were allowed to return to their village.
Mr. Lal said that
villagers, who had gathered at the outpost, heard one police officer remark
that “rapists get a rough treatment in jail, but murderers are thumped on their
backs.”
Veere Yadav, the father
of the three brothers, said that his sons were at home when the police came
looking for them. “If they were guilty, then they would have run away,” he
said.
In the village, the
failure of the police to prevent the crime has stirred up hostilities between
castes.
Both the victims and the
suspects belong to the lower castes, but only members of the Yadav caste (the
surname is the same as the caste) — who make up about 20 of the 400 households
in the village — are assigned to the closest police outpost.
After the furor over the
public hanging, Ram Vilas Yadav, the police official in charge of the outpost,
was suspended. Two police officers, who are facing criminal charges, have been
fired. Another was suspended.
On Sunday, Mr. Lal
received a stream of politicians and journalists on the veranda of his brick
house. He showed them passport-size photographs of the bodies suspended from
the tree.
“The policeman in charge
asked me to name my caste,” he said.
Among his visitors was
Mayawati, leader of the main opposition party in Uttar Pradesh, who rose to
power on the promise of empowering lower castes. She promised 500,000 rupees,
about $8,500, to the families of the victims, and demanded that they be
protected against retaliation.
“If anything happens to
their family, then I will leave Delhi and Lucknow and sit here,” she said. “We
will help you get justice.”
Police personnel from
nearby areas are guarding the victims’ families. The chief minister has also
accepted their demand for the investigation to be conducted by an agency of the
central government instead of by the state police.
Mr. Lal said he has
refused a payout from the state government, demanding that it deliver justice
by ensuring that the perpetrators are also hanged in public.
But Mr. Lal said he would
accept Mayawati’s help.
“She is genuine in her
promise. We can trust her,” he said. “Otherwise, we cannot trade our dignity
for some money.”
While the rape and murder
of the two cousins have become bound up with caste hostilities, some people
here said such tensions were exaggerated.
Kamal Kant Tiwari, head
of the village, noted that this was the first such crime in the community.
Members of the Yadav caste, he said, “are quite few in number, and everyone has
lived peacefully till now.”
“Like everywhere else,
there were fights in the village, but it was not based on caste,” he added.
Atul Saxena, a senior
police official who is leading the investigation, described the failure of the
police officers to help Mr. Lal as “gross negligence.”
“This is a horrible and
isolated case,” he said.
In the face of threats,
Mr. Yadav, father of the three accused men, said that he had left his home to
live on the banks of the Ganges River, two and a half miles away. “With the
boys gone, I’m too old to protect myself or my wife,” he said.
And while Mr. Lal’s grief
has been public, his wife, Sridevi, 40, who covers her face with her sari,
mourns more quietly. She said of her daughter: “She was very good at school,
and she had a good handwriting. She was ambitious, too, and wanted to be
doctor.”
In an English notebook,
her daughter had written a story about a farmer: “He was very honest. One day,
he was cutting his crop with a sickle. It was very hot. He felt very thirsty
and went to the river to drink water.”
