New India rapes spark resignation calls
Print Edition
INDIAN police said yesterday they were investigating a spate of rapes and hangings in a troubled northern region, as the national women’s rights body called for the state government to resign over the crisis.
India has been trying to restore its battered reputation for violence against women, but public outrage was reignited by the deaths last month of two girls, aged 12 and 14, who were gang-raped and lynched in their impoverished village in Uttar Pradesh state.
Yesterday a woman said she had been gang-raped by four officers at a police station in the state, and police said they were also investigating the death of a 19-year-old found, like the two girls, hanging from a tree.
“The body was strung up using the girl’s dupatta (long scarf),” senior police superintendent Ashutosh Kumar said, adding the incident occurred in a village in Moradabad district.
“The FIR (first information report) was lodged by the girl’s brother against unidentified persons. He has alleged the girl was murdered,” Kumar said.
The case is the latest in a series of attacks in Uttar Pradesh whose chief minister Akhilesh Yadav is under mounting political pressure to resign over his handling of law and order.
Mamata Sharma, head of the state-run National Commission for Women, urged Yadav to quit, calling his government’s failure to protect women “shameful.”
But Yadav, speaking on a visit to New Delhi, insisted that the situation was no worse than elsewhere in the country.
India last year brought in tougher laws against sexual offenders after the fatal gang-rape of a student in New Delhi in December 2012, an attack that drew international condemnation.
But the legislation, which was also designed to educate and sensitize police on rape cases, has failed to stem the tide of violence.
In southwest Uttar Pradesh, the woman who alleged she was gang-raped by four officers at a police station said the attack occurred as she was trying to seek her husband’s release.
“At 11:30pm when there was no one in the room the sub-inspector took me to his room and raped me,” the woman, who cannot be named, told the CNN-IBN channel.
The woman filed a complaint against the sub-inspector and three other officers, alleging she was attacked in Hamirpur district when she refused to pay them a bribe, police said.
Though police said they were investigating, they cast doubt on her claims, saying at least one of the officers was away from the station at the time.
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