Rape of women, children ‘epidemic’

Repeated rape of minors is shameful and worrying. Delhi police has completely failed to provide safety. What are PM n his LG (lieutenant governor) doing?

Police say they have arrested two teenagers for allegedly raping a toddler, in the latest incident of sexual violence against a young child in the Indian capital of New Delhi.

Top police officer Dependra Pathak said police had questioned more than 250 residents of the western Delhi neighbourhood where the 21⁄ year-old girl was raped and left bleeding in a park on Friday night.

In a separate incident, police on Saturday arrested three men for raping a 5-year-old in an east Delhi suburb.

The rape of the two little girls comes a week after a 4-year-old was raped and brutalised in New Delhi. Police arrested a 25-year-old man in that attack, in which the young girl suffered severe internal injuries.

The assaults have caused uproar, with Delhi residents accusing the city’s government of failure to protect women and girls.

The two attacks come as New Delhi grapples with a grim litany of sexual attacks against women – and in several recent cases, children – that have sparked outrage in India and abroad.

Pushpendra Kumar, West Delhi police chief, said they found the younger child bleeding profusely several hours after she went missing.

Tests on the 5-year-old victim showed she was raped multiple times. Locals managed to catch her alleged assailants and hand them over to the authorities.

‘‘Her clothes were partially torn with blood spots all over them. Some locals saw her and she told them she was sexually assaulted,’’ police in eastern Delhi said.

‘‘Some of the locals then barged into the house and caught them (the alleged perpetrators) before handing them over to us.’’

Both girls are undergoing medical treatment but are believed to be out of danger.

‘‘When will Delhi wake up? Till when will girls continue to be brutalised in Indian capital. Gangrape of 2.5-year n 5-year-old. Shameful,’’ Delhi Commission for Women chairwomen Swati Maliwal tweeted. Describing the assaults as ‘‘extremely shocking’’, Maliwal told Indian television station NDTV that violence against women had assumed ‘‘epidemic proportions’’ in Delhi.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal expressed anguish over the rapes, describing them as ‘‘shameful and worrying’’ on Twitter.

He blamed his political opponent Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government for the security situation in Delhi.

‘‘Repeated rape of minors is shameful and worrying. Delhi police has completely failed to provide safety. What are PM n his LG (lieutenant governor) doing?,’’ Kejriwal tweeted before heading to meet the victims in hospital.

Kejriwal and Modi’s administration are jostling for control of the capital’s police department, with Delhi city authorities saying they are unable to improve security for women. They deflect the blame on to Modi’s central government which controls Delhi’s 84,000 police, the largest metropolitan police force in the world.

The fatal gang rape of a young student on a bus in Delhi in 2012 led to an outpouring of anger over frightening levels of violence against women.

India recorded 36,735 rape cases in 2014, with 2096 of them in Delhi. Experts say those figures likely under-represent the true scale of the crimes.