Protests as more rapes reported
mumbai — Days after the arrest of a lawmaker from India’s ruling party in connection with the rape of a teenager, another case of the brutal rape and murder of a girl was reported on Sunday in the state of Gujarat in the country’s west.
News of the incident followed days of protests by activists, who have accused authorities of failing to investigate attacks on women across the country. The protests have been driven in part by the BJP lawmaker’s arrest last week for an alleged assault in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party governs.
Surat girl raped, murdered
Sunday’s reports concerned an incident that took place on April 5 in the western Gujarat city of Surat, the city’s police commissioner Satish Sharma said.
“The body was recovered on April 6 by the side of a highway and according to a post mortem report, the girl was sexually assaulted and murdered on April 5,” Sharma said. He added the victim — who was 11, according to the post-mortem — has not yet been identified and that police from Gujarat’s neighbouring states have been asked to help trace her family.
The post-mortem examination of the girl revealed a case of “strangulation and smothering” with 86 signs of minor injuries, including sexual assault, he said. Some of the injuries were old.
Minor gang raped in patna
A minor girl was gang raped here on Sunday and the police have arrested two accused persons, authorities said. The incident took place at 12.30am near a railway line adjacent to the GPO Golumber area, in the heart of Bihar’s capital city.
Police officer Rama Shankar Singh said the two accused, Chotu Kumar and Phekan Kumar, were arrested and interrogated. “Both accused were caught by a police patrol team that heard the loud cry of the victim for help .The victim has also identified both of them,” Singh said.
Four-year-old raped in odisha
A four-year-old girl was raped by a youth in Odisha’s Balasore district, police said on Sunday.
The accused, 24-year-old Nityacharan Jena, is the neighbour of the girl, the police said.
On Friday, when the girl was playing outside, he lured her to his house with chocolates and raped her, according to police.
The girl has been hospitalised. Her family lodged a police complaint on Saturday.
national anger
A separate case of gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in the divided state of Jammu and Kashmir has also caused national anger as details emerged of how the girl was kidnapped, drugged and held in captivity as eight Hindu men assaulted her.
The crumpled body of the girl who belonged to a nomadic tribe that roams Kashmir’s mountains was found in January but the case made slow progress until activists stepped up their campaign for an investigation.
The Surat incident took place in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, where he was chief minister from 2001 until he took national office in 2014.
The weekend’s protests, which echoed mass rallies against sexual violence in 2012, are piling pressure on Modi, who faces general elections due by May 2019, and he has promised to take action.
The United Nations is among the international bodies that condemned the two earlier incidents.
“We are deeply concerned about the prevalence of gender-based violence, including sexual violence against women and girls, which we are witnessing in India,” Yuri Afanasiev, the UN resident coordinator in India, said in a statement last week.
Protest rallies are being staged all over India on Sunday, with Bollywood actors expected to participate.
India’s opposition Congress party held a midnight candle-lit vigil at India Gate in New Delhi, the site where thousands of people protested in 2012 against a brutal gang-rape in the capital.
India registered about 40,000 rape cases in 2016, up from 25,000 in 2012, government data show. Rights activists say thousands more go unreported. — srinagar — National Conference President Farooq Abdullah on Sunday demanded a special Jammu and Kashmir Assembly session to pass a bill to hand out capital punishment to those convicted of raping minors.
“The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which are in power in the state, should convene a special session to pass the bill,” the Lok Sabha member said.
“It is only by awarding capital punishment to perpetrators of such heinous crime that incidents like Kathua rape and murder can be prevented from occurring in future,” the former chief minister said. —