[As outrage swelled, authorities promised swift and forceful justice. But in the hours after the victim disappeared, the initial reaction was indifference. Her family went to the local police station to seek help but the officers did not inform their superiors or report the incident to a centralized control room, said Prakash Reddy, a deputy commissioner of police. Three police officers from the station were subsequently suspended.]
By Joanna
Slater
 |
|
People
shout slogans during a protest on Dec. 2 against the rape and killing of a
woman
in Hyderabad, India. (Vinod Babu/Reuters)
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NEW
DELHI — It was around 9 p.m.
when the young woman returned to the toll plaza where she had parked her red
scooter. It had a flat tire, and a group of men offered to help.
Then they grabbed her, police said, took turns
raping her and then smothered her to death. They tried burning the evidence of
the crime: Her charred body was found the next morning, identified by her
elephant-shaped locket and a white scarf nearby.
The killing of the 26-year-old veterinarian
in the South Indian city of Hyderabad last week has provoked outrage and
anguish across India, the latest in a series of gruesome, high-profile crimes
against women and girls. Police arrested four men and said they had confessed
to the killing.
Speaking in Parliament on Monday, India’s
defense minister called it an “inhuman” crime that has “brought shame to the
entire country.”
The veterinarian’s killing recalled the
brutal rape and murder in 2012 of another young woman who was attacked after
boarding a private bus on her way home from a movie. Her death prompted mass
protests and ushered in a flurry of measures aimed at combating such crimes —
harsher sentences, fast-track courts and a government fund dedicated to women’s
safety.
The agonized commentary in the wake of the
Hyderabad case reflects the fear that these measures are not enough. M.
Venkaiah Naidu, India’s vice president, called on Monday for further changes to
the country’s laws and judicial system.
Do not make the “mistake of attributing [it]
to one state or one city,” he said. “It is a societal weakness, a societal
disease. It is sort of a lacuna in our systems, both legal as well as police
systems.”
According to the most recent national crime
statistics, about 33,000 rapes were reported in India in 2017, marking a
decrease from the prior two years (about 100,000 rapes were reported in the
United States in 2017). Advocates say that India’s official figures understate
the scope of the problem, with the vast majority of victims still unlikely to
approach authorities.
Victims who do report rapes face a long and
uncertain legal process. “It takes a particularly dogged survivor of sexual
assault — almost an activist — to stay the course,” said Karuna Nundy, a
Supreme Court lawyer. About 25 percent of such cases result in conviction, she
said, a higher rate than in Britain or South Africa.
After news of the veterinarian’s killing
spread, demonstrations erupted in Hyderabad over the weekend. Thousands of
people protested at a police station near where the woman’s body was found and
outside the gated compound where her family lives. In New Delhi, a young woman
was arrested for holding a sign in a high-security area outside Parliament that
read, “Why can’t I feel safe in my own India?”
As outrage swelled, authorities promised
swift and forceful justice. But in the hours after the victim disappeared, the
initial reaction was indifference. Her family went to the local police station
to seek help but the officers did not inform their superiors or report the
incident to a centralized control room, said Prakash Reddy, a deputy
commissioner of police. Three police officers from the station were
subsequently suspended.
While government officials expressed horror
at the crime, they also made comments that blamed the victim. A senior
politician said that the woman would have been saved had she called the police emergency
line, rather than her sister, upon realizing that she had a flat tire. The
chief minister of the state of Telangana, where Hyderabad is located, used the
incident to argue that some female state employees should not work after dark.
The police quickly arrested four men in their
20s in connection with the crime. Two of the alleged perpetrators worked
hauling truckloads of bricks and other cargo, a police document said, and they
had parked their vehicle at a busy toll plaza near Hyderabad’s airport.
[In India, it’s not easy to report on rape]
According to police, the four men had been
drinking whiskey on Nov. 27 when the young woman parked her scooter nearby and
went to a dermatology appointment. While she was gone, they deflated her tire
and made a plan to assault her. When she came back, they offered to take her
scooter to get the tire refilled. She made one call before they returned — to
her younger sister — and said that she was afraid.
Attempts to identify lawyers for the four
suspects were unsuccessful and it is unclear whether they have legal counsel.
One local bar association said that its members had passed a resolution not to
represent the accused in the case, citing a “moral responsibility to give
support to the family of the victim.”
The Washington Post is withholding the
identity of the woman because Indian courts have ruled that the names of
victims of sexual assault and harassment should not be publicly disclosed.
However, her name has been widely circulated on social media and by some news
outlets.
The victim’s younger sister, Bhavya, was the
last relative she spoke to before she was killed. Bhavya said that recalling
her sister’s last words made her weep and that she hoped no one else would
experience such sorrow. On Monday, the family went to a river to scatter the
woman’s remains.
B. Kartheek in Hyderabad and Tania Dutta in
New Delhi contributed to this report.
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