A Brutal & Brazen Tragedy

While the gangrape and death of a young woman in UP shocked the nation, what numbed it was the heartlessness of the police who cremated her in the dead of the night and claimed that she hadn’t even been raped

- Shivani Chauhan

SOME eight years after the Nirbhaya case shook India's conscience, the gangrape of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh on September 14, 2020, by four upper caste men triggered shock and outrage across the country. While newspapers were awash with the march by Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to Hathras and their inability to complete it in the face of police muscle, the issue is yet to see mass political action.

The Hathras case exploded in the news in the last week of September when the mother of the Dalit woman found her in the fields on September 22. She was lying in a pool of blood, paralysed. Some reports said she was naked, her tongue had been slashed and that her spinal cord severely injured. The woman had gone missing on September 14 when the family had set out to cut grass in a field. The mother, who was hard of hearing, and the daughter got separated as they were cutting grass in different parts of the field. The family looked for her but couldn’t find her. She was eventually found and recounted that she had been forced into a bajra field by four upper-caste men and gang-raped and dragged by a dupatta tied around her neck.

The victim was then admitted to Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College and Hospital in Aligarh where she struggled for some two weeks. With no sign of improvement, she was referred to Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences. But the victim was admitted to the nearby Safdarjung Hospital on September 28. She died in the wee hours of the next day.