Five Cases Of Rape And Murder In The Last One Week, Nothing Has Changed Since Nirbhaya

India is a beautiful country that cares deeply about its culture and heritage. So much so that a movie, that was based on a fictional Rajput queen, ‘Padmavati’ had to be renamed ‘Padmavaat’ as certain people thought that the nature of the movie would malign the image of the warrior queen. You see, as a country, we sincerely care about our women hence, waking up to the grotesque news of the gangrape of a 15-year-old girl should not bother you.

Nirbhaya-like incident

In 2012, when the news of a woman brutally gang-raped in a moving bus and her naked body thrown on the side of the road in Delhi surfaced, the entire country was furious. There were candlelight marches and campaigns demanding justice for “India’s Daughter”, Jyoti Singh. But, has the situation changed after that?

Almost five years after the incident, on January 12, we read the news of another such brutal gangrape. The lifeless body of the 15-year-old Dalit girl was found near a canal in Jind district, nearly 100 km west of New Delhi.

Doctors say that she has been gang-raped and her body has been mutilated. Dr SK Dattawal, who was present at a post-mortem described the victim’s horrific injuries to The Indian Express.

It doesn’t seem to be the case of rape by one person. She was probably sexually assaulted by more than two persons. They might have tried to thrust some object into her vagina also. Her liver was found ruptured.

“There was only a torn shirt on her body. The injuries were all around the body, on the face, neck, lips and chest. It appears that the victim had struggled a lot to escape from the sexual assault. The attackers might have tried to press her mouth also,” added Dhattarwal, who is a senior professor at PGIMS.

The girl was missing since January 9, before she was found dead. “On the afternoon of January 9, she had left for tuition classes, as usual. When I went to pick her up at 8 pm, the teacher informed me that she had not arrived that day. She was nowhere to be found. Around 10 pm that night we filed a police complaint,” the father of the victim told Al Jazeera.

He added if the police had done a better job to find her when the missing complaint was lodged, maybe she would have lived.

Not the only incident

Almost four rapes have been recorded in Haryana in the last one week.

A 50-year-old man from Haryana was arrested for assaulting a 10-year-old child. The man, who is a distant relative of the victim, allegedly inserted a wooden object into her private parts, police said, according to Hindustan Times. The officer said that as per the complaint was given to the police, the accused had not raped the girl, but assaulted her in a brutal manner. According to the complaint, the accused mutilated the private parts of the 10-year-old.

Another incident came to light when the semi-naked body of an 11-year-old was recovered in Panipat on Sunday. The police arrested the neighbours, and they confessed to raping and killing the girl.

On Friday, a 15-year-old was found raped and murdered in Kurukshetra. The post-mortem found that she was raped by more than one person and a blunt object was inserted inside her private parts. Her genitals were mutilated, and vital organs were ruptured. The main accused, a Class 12 student, and his accomplices are on the run.

In another horrible incident, a 22-year-old was raped inside a moving car. According to the report, the victim had been walking home from work, when a Scorpio carrying four men pulled up beside her. The men allegedly abducted her and raped her for over two hours, as they drove towards Palwal.

India, very safe for women

After the 2012 uproar against after the Nirbhaya gang rape case, the government was forced to introduce stricter anti-rape laws, including the death penalty. The four accused in the Nirbhaya rape case were awarded capital punishment. But incidents such as these show that nothing has changed in the last five years.

According to National Crime Records Bureau data for 2016, incidents of rape of children in India increased by over 82% compared with 2015.

In 2016, police in India registered 38,947 rape complaints, an increase of 12.4% from the previous year.

The Logical Indian take

With the increasing number of rapes in India, it is safe to say that a woman will only be protected in the country if they are fictional. Who cares about reality?

The Logical Indian community is perturbed by the incident. Such cases of sexual assault directly point to the problems in our society and how it fails to equate women to men even in the 21st century. When a minor is raped, it shows the patriarchal and misogynistic background of the society. All of us share the blame and need to open our minds for the country to progress in the right direction.