Sunday, 22 September 2024
Sunday, 22 September 2024
Nearly 90 rape cases are registered daily in India and despite all the uproar, political blame games and judicial interventions, that situation hasn’t changed in the past 40-odd days that Bengal has been on the boil over the rape and murder of the postgraduate trainee doctor at the state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital.
Here’s a quick recap of only a few such reported cases of sexual assault and rape in India in the last seven days. Children, elderly women and even survivors under protection have been raped. One rape survivor was even gunned down by her attacker who was out on bail.
On September 20, in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, three men drugged, abducted, and gang-raped a 13-year-old Dalit girl in a moving car. The teenager was out to buy groceries for breakfast.
According to police reports quoted by PTI, Neeraj, one of the accused, spiked the girl’s drink at the shop. As she collapsed, Neeraj, along with Shailendra and another man, allegedly took her away in a car. They raped the girl in the moving car while she was in a semi-conscious state. They threw her off the car under the flyover of Barsana Road and fled.
The girl found her way home and told her parents. Trigun Bisen, superintendent of police (rural) was quoted by PTI as saying that while narrating her ordeal, the condition of the girl deteriorated and the family took her to a doctor who confirmed that she was raped.
In Telangana, a 65-year-old woman was raped by her neighbour and two others after they called her to his house on the pretense of cooking on September 19.
On September 18, police in Saharsa, Bihar, around 180km east of the state capital Patna, arrested one of the accused days after a 14-year-old girl, who had gone to graze goats, was pulled inside an SUV at gunpoint and gang-raped in the moving vehicle. They played loud music to muffle her screams as they raped her for two hours. Then, they threw her out on the road, threatening her of even worse consequences if she told anyone about it.
The girl returned home with bite injuries, her clothes torn. She did not tell anything to her parents but narrated the ordeal to her aunt on September 16.
On September 18, news broke of a schoolteacher who had raped a three-year-old in Bhopal. The school management reportedly ignored the mother’s complaint when she approached the school after spotting injury marks in her daughter’s private parts. The mother approached police on September 16 after the school management ignored her complaint, according to a PTI report quoting deputy commissioner of police Priyanka Shukla.
The child is three years and seven months old, the police official said. Bhopal police have arrested the 28-year-old teacher.
The same day the Bhopal news broke, a 16-year-old tribal girl was gang-raped when she was returning home from her school in Jharkhand’s Khunti district. The girl told the police that 10 men dragged her to the roadside bushes when she was returning home from school in the afternoon, and five of them raped her.
Agsin on September 18, a 17-year-old rape survivor from Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh was shot dead by her rapist. She had filed a case in February against a man for raping her. Ghaziabad police had arrested the man, Rinku. He was released on bail earlier this month.
On September 15, a nine-year-old girl was raped in front of her younger sister in Pardi area in Nagpur. The 9-year-old was alone at home with her 5-year-old sister while their daily-wage labourer parents had gone to work.
The rapist, yet to be identified, offered the 5-year-old Rs 20 to stay silent, as per the complaint.
In Uttarakhand, a nurse was raped and murdered who worked in Udham Singh Nagar district, A girl was gangraped in a bus at the ISBT near a police chowki in Dehradun and another girl was molested at a footwear shop in Paltan Bazaar in broad daylight.
In the last seven days, there have been back to back gang-rapes of schoolgirls in Assam’s Nagaon, leading to protests.
In Bengal, a first-year student at a technical institution in Alipurdur district filed a police complaint alleging a senior had raped her. In Coochbehar, police on September 20 arrested Irshad, accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl on September 10.
In rape cases, arrests of the accused are often not the end of the story. According to National Crime Records Bureau data, conviction rates for rapes in India hover around 27-28 per cent, year after year.
It is also accepted that for every case that makes it to the news wires, there are countless others that don’t. Even for the ones that do become headlines, only a few spark widespread outrage.
No one really knows why.
