A team of women activists that visited the family of the Dalit teen who was gang-raped and murdered in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras last month demanded the suspension of the district magistrate in addition to the cops already benched, and also a probe into “diversionary propaganda”.
The team that went to the victim’s village on Monday included Annie Raja, general secretary of the CPI’s National Federation of Indian Women; Poonam Kaushik, general secretary of the CPIML-New Democracy’s Pragatisheel Mahila Sangathan; and Shabnam Hashmi of Act Now for Harmony and Democracy, a civil rights group based in Delhi.
In their report released on Tuesday, they said the village had a history of Dalit women being harassed by men from the dominant Thakur community.
“The girls and women of Dalit families face harassment on a regular basis when they go out. One of the accused had in fact tried several times in the past six months to harass the deceased girl and as a result she had stopped going out alone… From the moment they took her to Hathras police station to her forced cremation, they faced intimidation, threats, manhandling (and) also allurement of money once the case became public. The family was particularly distraught at the atrocious manner in which the police cremated her without allowing any of the family members to take a last look,” the report said.
They accused the Uttar Pradesh government and the BJP of spreading false information. “We note with grave concern and indignation that despite the deceased’s dying declaration and circumstantial evidence, various members of the ruling party and members of the dominant caste have started building a narrative that the victim was not raped.
“The head of the BJP IT cell tweeted a video of the girl disclosing her identity, which violates the law, in an attempt to say that she was not raped…. The UP government has filed cases against those who organised protests against the brutal attack on the Dalit girl by men of high caste, and is now calling it an international conspiracy to malign the Yogi government and create caste riots in UP,” the report added.
Besides iterating the demand for chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s resignation, a time-bound probe and protection of the family, the activists also sought the suspension of Hathras district magistrate Praveen Kumar Laxkar under whose watch the forcible cremation took place. The team demanded “an enquiry into the role of all authorities, including public representatives, in denying justice”, and “that NHRC should investigate why all dissent is being criminalised”.
The team also spoke to doctors at the Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College in Aligarh where the girl had been admitted.
