Story of shaky probe, shoddy political response
NEW DELHI: For a fortnight now, the gangrape and murder of a Class 10 girl in Shimla has caused unprecedented turmoil among the peace-loving P ah ar is. But the “conscious-keepers” in Delhi have been unmoved by the sheer brutality of the crime and the shoddy investigation that followed.The silence of the activists and the political class is all the more glaring given the Congressled government’ s inept handling of the case and a huge social media uproar against the probe.
According to police ,16- yearold Gudiya( the name given to the victim by locals) was allegedly waylaid by six people while she was returning home from school. They injected the girl with intoxicants before taking turns to rape her, strangling her at the same time. The mark son her body bear witness to the fact that she was bitten savagely. They then dumped her body near her home at Kotkhai tehsil’s Halaila village. When Gudiya’s body was finally discovered on July 6, two days after she went missing, it was crawling with maggots.
The police, as usual, were slow to react. It was only when pictures of the girl’ s naked body, her legs horribly twisted, went viral that the government began taking the case seriously. Public anger swept through S him la, and people from all walks of life took out candlelight march es demanding swift action.
A special investigation team was constituted under inspector general of police Zahur Zaidi, who “cracked” the case nine days later with the arrest of six people – including Ashish Chauhan, an engineering graduate, and 32-year-old Rajendra Singh, a local. The other accused were non-Himachalis, and strangely enough, they hadn’t fled.
Zaidi’s version further infuriated people, who alleged that the six were framed to protect influential locals closely linked to the ruling dispensation. CM Virbhadra Singh initially resisted calls for a CBI investigation but buckled when an unruly crowd burnt police vans and blocked highways last week.
The crisis reached a tipping point on Wednesday, when Suraj Singh – a Nepalese national accused – was reportedly strangled by another suspect, 32-yearold Rajender Singh, at the Kotkhai police station. What happened at the station remains a mystery because the two were housed in adjacent cells.
While 83-year-old Virbhadra blamed the BJP for causing the unrest, he failed to read the sentiments of a population that has traditionally supported him. Making things worse was his apparent disinterest in the worst crime to be reported from the hills in a long time.
Another factor that has angered most Himachalis is the failure of liberal voices in Delhi to take note of Gudiya’s rape-cum-murder despite all the online campaigns and petitions. They believe this crime was no less brutal than the 2012 Delhi gang rape case, and the only reason for the lack of outrage was the accounting for just four Lok S ab has eats–making it less politically significant.