First came the gang-rape of two cousins aged 12 and 14 who were later tortured and hanged from a mango tree a fortnight ago in India’s state of Uttar Pradesh.
This week, in the same mostly rural province that is home to more than 200 million people, brought further horrors.
On Monday the body of a rape victim, a 13-year-old girl, was found dumped in a sugar cane field.
The same night a 35-year-old woman, who had walked into a police station in the Sumerpur district seeking the release of her husband, was raped by station house officer Rahul Pandey when she refused to pay a bribe. Three constables stood calmly by, watching mute and unfazed by their senior officer’s behaviour.
Then on Thursday morning came the discovery of a 16-year-old girl, also hanging from a tree, yet another victim of an apparent gang-rape.
All of the women were from the lowest rungs of India’s caste system, while all of the alleged culprits were from the higher Yadav caste, traditionally a middle-ranking pastoral community.
"These men act with a kind of depraved sense of impunity," Ranjana Kumari, a prominent women’s rights campaigner and director of the Centre for Social Research in Delhi, says.
"They act by ignoring the laws, and they are behaving that way because the men who run the state encourage them. Men know that no one will ever do anything to punish them. The chief minister, the bureaucrats, the police, they all take the same attitude, they do not care."
To be sure, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav, who was branded India’s worst chief minister this week on the cover of the national news weekly magazine Outlook, has spent the last two weeks blithely dismissing the gang-rapes as a media beat-up.
Yet the figures tell a different story. Since Mr Yadav led his Samajwadi Party to victory in state elections in 2012, a culture of rampant lawlessness, or "goonda raj", appears to have taken hold over the state. In the past two years there have been 10 rapes reported every day, more than 23,000 reported incidents against women and nearly 8000 kidnapping and abduction cases.
On Thursday Mr Yadav, widely derided as the cat’s paw of his father Mulayam Singh Yadav, who is a former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and now a federal MP, spent the day trying to woo the crowd at a conference for international investors.
"These rapes have little to do with sex, it’s all about caste,” Badri Narayan, of the Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute and an expert on Dalit politics, says. "Rape is a tool of oppression, of punishment, of humiliation, and hanging women from trees serves as a warning to others."
After Uttar Pradesh’s voters hammered Mr Yadav's political party in the recent national elections, giving it only five seats out of 80 while Narendra Modi’s BJP swept up 71, Professor Narayan says there has been an atmosphere of revenge.
The victims, Professor Narayan says, belong to constituencies that were formerly held by the Samajwadi Party, and are believed to have voted either for the BJP or another alternative.
"We don’t know exactly, of course, who the victims voted for, but that is the perception and now we have these thugs roaming the villages seeking vengeance, looking to punish the Dalits, and sending the message about who is really in control," he says...
This week, in the same mostly rural province that is home to more than 200 million people, brought further horrors.
On Monday the body of a rape victim, a 13-year-old girl, was found dumped in a sugar cane field.
The same night a 35-year-old woman, who had walked into a police station in the Sumerpur district seeking the release of her husband, was raped by station house officer Rahul Pandey when she refused to pay a bribe. Three constables stood calmly by, watching mute and unfazed by their senior officer’s behaviour.
Then on Thursday morning came the discovery of a 16-year-old girl, also hanging from a tree, yet another victim of an apparent gang-rape.
All of the women were from the lowest rungs of India’s caste system, while all of the alleged culprits were from the higher Yadav caste, traditionally a middle-ranking pastoral community.
"These men act with a kind of depraved sense of impunity," Ranjana Kumari, a prominent women’s rights campaigner and director of the Centre for Social Research in Delhi, says.
"They act by ignoring the laws, and they are behaving that way because the men who run the state encourage them. Men know that no one will ever do anything to punish them. The chief minister, the bureaucrats, the police, they all take the same attitude, they do not care."
To be sure, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav, who was branded India’s worst chief minister this week on the cover of the national news weekly magazine Outlook, has spent the last two weeks blithely dismissing the gang-rapes as a media beat-up.
Yet the figures tell a different story. Since Mr Yadav led his Samajwadi Party to victory in state elections in 2012, a culture of rampant lawlessness, or "goonda raj", appears to have taken hold over the state. In the past two years there have been 10 rapes reported every day, more than 23,000 reported incidents against women and nearly 8000 kidnapping and abduction cases.
On Thursday Mr Yadav, widely derided as the cat’s paw of his father Mulayam Singh Yadav, who is a former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and now a federal MP, spent the day trying to woo the crowd at a conference for international investors.
"These rapes have little to do with sex, it’s all about caste,” Badri Narayan, of the Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute and an expert on Dalit politics, says. "Rape is a tool of oppression, of punishment, of humiliation, and hanging women from trees serves as a warning to others."
After Uttar Pradesh’s voters hammered Mr Yadav's political party in the recent national elections, giving it only five seats out of 80 while Narendra Modi’s BJP swept up 71, Professor Narayan says there has been an atmosphere of revenge.
The victims, Professor Narayan says, belong to constituencies that were formerly held by the Samajwadi Party, and are believed to have voted either for the BJP or another alternative.
"We don’t know exactly, of course, who the victims voted for, but that is the perception and now we have these thugs roaming the villages seeking vengeance, looking to punish the Dalits, and sending the message about who is really in control," he says...
Source: Latest News in Hindi
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