NEW DELHI � A teenager from a north Indian village who was
dragged from a field and raped by a group of men died of her
injuries at a hospital in New Delhi on Tuesday, triggering
nationwide outrage again after years of what experts describe as
a gang rape epidemic in India.

The 19-year-old woman, whom Indian law prohibits naming, had
been transferred to the hospital just a day before, two weeks
after she was gang-raped and mutilated by higher caste men near
their village in the Hathras District in Uttar Pradesh State,
her family said.

The police chief in Hathras, Vikrant Vir, said that four men had
been arrested on charges of gang rape and murder. Prime Minister
Narendra Modi said that �strictest action� should be taken
against the attackers, according to a Twitter post by Yogi
Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh�s top elected official and a leader of
Mr. Modi�s Bharatiya Janata Party.

But justice is unlikely: Of the tens of thousands of rape cases
reported in India annually, only a handful result in
prosecutions, National Crime Records Bureau figures show.
Activists say the true scope of the problem is far worse, as
many cases are never reported because of the stigma of sexual
violence in India.

When action is taken against suspects, it is often by vigilantes
or by police officers acting extrajudicially, in killings that
are usually widely praised but that also point out the justice
system�s inability to deal with rampant sexual violence.

The woman was Dalit, on the lowest rung of India�s Hindu caste
hierarchy. On Tuesday, hundreds of protesters from the Bhim
Army, a party advocating for the rights of Dalits, thronged the
Delhi hospital where the woman was treated and clashed with the
police.

A leader of the Bhim Army, Chandrashekhar Azad, urged Dalits
across India to take to the streets to demand that the attackers
be hanged.

The anger was fueled by another rape and death that disclosed by
the police on Thursday, also in Uttar Pradesh. In that attack in
the district of Balrampur, a 22 year old woman was raped by two
men, then died of her injuries while on her way to the hospital.
Police said that the two suspects had been arrested.

The 19-year-old woman was cutting grass to feed the family�s
five milk buffalo in Hathras when she was taken away by a group
of upper-caste men on Sept. 14, according to her brother.

Her tongue was cut and her spinal cord was broken after she was
dragged by her neck with a rope, the brother said. He said that
arrests came only after days of complaints to the police. His
sister was initially treated at a hospital in Uttar Pradesh
before being transferred to New Delhi.

Mr. Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, said in
another tweet that a special investigative team had been formed
to take on the case and that a report would be delivered within
a week.

After the woman died in the hospital in New Delhi, her body was
taken back to Uttar Pradesh, where the police seized her body in
the early hours Wednesday and took her to be cremated without
the family, ostensibly to try to keep the case quiet, the
brother said.

�They took the body by force, assaulted the family members, and
cremated my sister in the night itself,� he said. �Police did
not allow us near the cremation place.�

The Hathras police did not immediately comment on the family�s
accusations. But the district magistrate, Praveen Kumar Laxkar,
told reporters on Wednesday that it was untrue that family
members were not allowed at the cremation.

Dalits are particularly vulnerable to caste-based
discrimination, and Dalit women are singled out for sexual
attacks thousands of times a year, according to human rights
organizations.

Gruesome reports of rape, often followed by retaliatory violence
if victims or their families speak out, have become painfully
familiar in India. Whether a rape report rises above the din to
receive national notice is often determined by class and caste
dynamics.

A student�s shocking gang rape aboard a bus in New Delhi in
2012, which later resulted in her death, galvanized a nationwide
protest, with demonstrators clamoring for reform. But the
country�s overburdened court system continues to move slowly.
Four men convicted in the 2012 case were hanged earlier this
year, after exhausting their appeals.

The police killing of four suspects in the alleged gang-rape of
a 27-year-old veterinarian last year in the southern state of
Hyderabad was widely cheered as a swift workaround to Indian
justice.

Swati Maliwal, head of the Delhi Commission for Women, went on a
hunger strike outside Mahatma Gandhi�s mausoleum in New Delhi
last year, demanding that lawmakers pass a bill to force courts
to carry out the executions of rapists within six months of
being convicted.

On Wednesday, Maliwal said in a public statement that the
Hathras case had �embarrassed the entire nation� and that she
had written to the chief justice of India�s Supreme Court,
�pleading for justice for the girl child.�

The teen�s death this week followed a string of disturbing rape
reports in India as the country struggles with the coronavirus
pandemic. In one case, in the southern state of Kerala, an
ambulance driver is accused of raping a Covid-19 patient while
taking her to the hospital. In August, the mutilated body of a
13-year-old was found in a sugar cane field in Uttar Pradesh,
near the border with Nepal. In July, a 6-year-old girl was
kidnapped and raped in the southern state of Madhya Pradesh, and
her eyes were severely injured in an attempt to keep her from
identifying her attackers.

According to the latest Indian government data, the police
registered 33,658 cases of rape in 2017 � an average of 92 per
day and a 35 percent jump from 2012, when fast-track courts for
rape cases were rolled out. About 10,000 of the reported victims
were children.

Hari Kumar reported from New Delhi, and Emily Schmall from
Chicago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/world/asia/india-rape-
caste.html
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