[Her family accuses four men of
raping her, then killing her and quickly cremating the body to hide evidence.
Demonstrators in the capital say it still happens all too often.]
By Mujib Mashal and Suhasini Raj
Told that her daughter had been
electrocuted, she rushed to the crematory only to find signs of abuse on the
girl’s body. Despite her protests, men at the site quickly cremated her
daughter’s body even before the girl’s father could get there — destroying
evidence, she said, of the rape she believed they had committed.
The case has stirred a new wave of
protests in New Delhi over rampant sexual violence, particularly against women
and girls who are low-caste Dalits, as the girl and her family are.
The girl’s parents say that their
child was raped and killed by four men, including the crematory’s head priest.
They accuse the police in Delhi of not stopping the men from destroying
potential evidence, and then detaining and pressuring them to file only a
complaint that echoed the priest’s version of what happened — that the child
had been electrocuted after stepping on a wire.
The police say that an
investigation is underway and that they have arrested the four accused men, who
have now been charged with rape, murder and wrongful confinement. The police
denied the family’s accusations of negligence and mistreatment.
“The priest said, ‘Don’t make a
noise, don’t shout, or else you will have to face a lengthy court case,’” the
child’s mother said in an interview with The New York Times. “If she died of
electric current, why was he rushing to cremate her without a record?”
(Indian law prohibits the
publication of names or any identifying details of rape victims or their
families.)
Opposition leaders have raised
questions about the handling by New Delhi’s police, who answer to Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s central government. Opposition groups, Dalit activist
organizations, and youth- and gender-rights activists have held candle vigils
and protests near the country’s Parliament, demanding “justice for the nation’s
daughter” — a slogan that has become familiar as it is repeated after each
brutal assault.
The young girl’s family has set up
a protest tent on the main road of the Delhi Cantonment, just a couple hundred
yards from the crime scene and not far from a shrine where mother and daughter
would beg for alms.
Two dozen security forces guarded
the crematory, its gates shut, on Thursday. Both the water cooler and the pyre
where the cremation occurred were sealed off with police tape.
The young girl’s family had moved
into a single-room apartment in a narrow alley off the main road less than a
month ago. She had quickly made friends with the neighborhood children,
playing Carrom
pool with her downstairs neighbors.
“She was so sensible, so well
mannered,” Suman, a downstairs neighbor, said. “And she was tough.”
The apartments don’t have a source
of clean drinking water, and residents normally fetch from a pump near the
shrine on the main road. The girl would go an extra step, crossing the street
to the crematory, which had a water cooler.
She never made it home from her
water run on the evening of Aug. 1. Her mother began to grow worried, then the
crematory priest sent word that the girl had been electrocuted.
But when she rushed there, she
found signs of abuse on her daughter’s body, she said.
“Her hands were bruised, the skin
on one hand was peeling off. Her lips were blue and black. I opened her mouth a
bit, her teeth were getting blue and black. Her eyes were shut, her hair
spread, her clothes were wet. She was lying on the bench inside the crematory,”
she said.
The mother said that despite her
protests to wait for the girl’s father to arrive and determine what had
happened, the priest and the three other men rushed through the death rites and
set the body on fire. When her husband arrived and a crowd gathered, some
police officers were already there, but they weren’t stopping the forced
cremation, two witnesses said.
“The priest said, ‘You are beggars,
how will you fight in the court and in the police station?’” she said. “I was
going crazy. Her father wasn’t there, he hadn’t even seen her face, and the
priest was saying, ‘I will cremate her here.’ I said don’t cremate her! The
priest cremated her by force.”
Some in the crowd seized the priest
and began beating him and accusing him of rape, witnesses and the family said.
The mother said she and her husband
were then taken to the police station where they remained until early the next
evening. She said that they were kept in separate rooms, beaten and intimidated
by an informer for the police, who was allowed inside and told them to accept
the account that the child had died of electrocution and not to mention rape.
Ingit Pratap Singh, the deputy
commissioner of police for Southwest Delhi, said the reason for the parents’
remaining for so long in the police station was that they were brought in past
midnight and it takes time to file a complaint and take the family before a
magistrate when court proceedings begin the next morning. He denied accusations
that the police had stood by at the crematory or that the family was
mistreated.
Mr. Singh said the couple had not
made the charge of rape in the initial complaint when they went before the
magistrate. That charge was only added to the file a day later, after the two
had met officers of a commission that looks into allegations of abuse and
discrimination against members of lower castes.
“But in front of the metropolitan
magistrate there was no police,” Mr. Singh said. “Why did they not mention rape
before the metropolitan magistrate?”
Rights activists say that local
authorities often try to hush up cases like this one. In a similar
case in the state of Uttar Pradesh last year, the police delayed
filing charges in the alleged gang-rape of a 19-year-old Dalit girl despite the
victim’s video statement in the hospital, where she later died of her wounds.
Questions of law enforcement bias intensified after the family accused the
police of rushing the body to cremation in the dark of the night. The family is
still waiting for a trial.
“You see a similar pattern — police
have not been able to file a proper investigation report, as a result of which
a lot of perpetrators of rape crime go free,” said Ranjana Kumari, the director
for the Centre for Social Research, who formerly led the rape crisis
intervention center in Delhi. “The conviction rate for crimes against women remains
at a dismal 24 percent.” She said that police officers’ caste bias kicks in
strongly when the victims are Dalit.
“The police, unfortunately, have
been siding with the ruling or the elite class,” Ms. Kumari said. “This has
been a pattern in policing in India.”
