The victim was a member of the Dalit community, formerly called “untouchables” and considered to be at the bottom of the Hindu caste scale. A 16-year-old Indian girl who was allegedly raped and then burned to death by her two assailants has died of her injuries in hospital, Indian police said on Tuesday. She died Monday in a hospital in Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh (north) after being assaulted earlier in September.
The two men accused of raping and burning her were arrested “two hours after the incident was reported” and police assured the family of proper follow-up, local police chief Dinesh Kumar Prabhu said. .
The police and the Dalits
Police officers were deployed around the girl’s family home “to prevent any unwanted incidents”, Dinesh Kumar Prabhu added. The police are often accused of not taking Dalit cases seriously.
Furthermore, in previous similar cases, families from lower classes have been threatened or attacked to prevent them from testifying. Dalit women are disproportionately victims of sex crimes, in a country where crime against women is already very high.
Another macabre affair
The girl’s death comes less than a week after the bodies of two Dalit sisters, aged 15 and 17, were found hanging from a tree near their village. They were allegedly raped and strangled by six men who were arrested. Both cases occurred in Uttar Pradesh, a poor state of nearly 230 million people where such crimes regularly make headlines.
At the end of 2020, state authorities sparked outrage in the country by cremating in the middle of the night, before any autopsy, a 19-year-old Dalit girl raped and killed by four men from upper castes, according to the family. Nearly 32,000 rapes were recorded in 2021 in India, according to government figures – they are considered to be far below reality, with many cases remaining unreported.