Gang Rape of Spanish Woman is Part of a Continuous Pattern

The gang rape of a Spanish woman in Dumka district of Jharkhand, however horrific, is not unexpected. Foreign women have been victims of sexual assault earlier as well. A 20-year-old Japanese tourist was allegedly raped by a Jaipur- based youth who had befriended her as a guide a few years ago.

In the Jharkhand incident, the Spanish woman and her Brazilian husband were travelling across South Asia on a motorcycle. To our disgrace, nothing happened to them in Pakistan whereas the 30-year-old woman was gang-raped in a forest in Kunji Basti.

A horribly similar incident occurred a decade ago when six men gang-raped and robbed a 39-year old Swiss tourist when she and her partner were camping for the night in a forest in the Datia district of Madhya Pradesh while on a bicycle tour. In 2003, another shocking rape occurred in the heart of the capital when a Swiss diplomat went public to declare she had been tortured and sexually assaulted in her own Qualis car after being abducted from Siri Fort. Shockingly, the culprits of this crime were never found.

Crimes against women including rape, kidnapping, murder after rape and gang rape have shown a steep rise, according to statistics documented by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The state of Uttar Pradesh ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) topped by recording 65,743 such cases in 2022 against 56,083 in 2021 and 48,385 in 2020.

Why does the police fail to take action in BJP-ruled states given that NCRB records show that Uttar Pradesh has topped all our states in crimes against women, followed by Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan?

Rapists have become so emboldened that they do not hesitate to take videos of the rape, which are then posted online. In August 2023, a 15-year-old girl from Kaushambi district in UP committed suicide after the clip of her being raped went viral.  A similar video went viral when three boys reportedly belonging to the BJP IT cell in Varanasi gang-raped a B.Tech IIT student at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in November 2023.

Initially, no action was taken against the three accused though their identity was widely known in BHU. Pressure from the student community forced the cops to act but when they did so, a first information report or FIR was filed under a weaker Section 354 (criminal force used with the intent to outrage a woman’s modesty). Even today, the three arrested men are under judicial and not police custody.

On February 28, two young girls aged 14 and 16 years, hanged themselves from a tree using their dupatta (stole). Both worked in a brick-kiln with their parents and belonged to a village in Kanpur district. The owner of the brick-kiln, along with his son and nephew, reportedly forced them to consume alcohol and then gang-raped them, making an objectionable video of the entire gruesome act.

What defence do such young girls or their families have against the circulation of such videos? It is not just young girls and older women who are unable to cope with their inner trauma and public humiliation, even their family members find themselves unable to cope with this public shaming and end up dying by suicide.

This was what happened to the grief-stricken 38-year-old father whose minor daughter was gang-raped in Akodhi village of Jalaun district in Uttar Pradesh. In an email to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s Jansunwai online portal, the father complained bitterly against the police for their failure to even register a complaint. With no follow up, the grief-stricken father died by suicide in June 2023.

There is horror and outrage but no such stigma attached to gang rape in Western societies because the Spanish couple took to the social media to narrate their harrowing experience in India.

However, instead of accepting the extent of this problem, the National Commission of Women (NCW) chairperson, Rekha Sharma, after this gang rape, has gone on record to equate the crucial issue of safety of women with ‘defamation’ of the country. She wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that “writing only on social media and defaming whole country is not good choice.”

The problem in India is that all crimes, including sexual crimes, are being used by the government to score political brownie points with little effort being made to pull up the administration and ensure a halt to such horrific crimes.  Jharkhand is no exception, with BJP politicians in the state targeting the Opposition-led state government for “bringing the country and the state to shame”. 

Rape has been completely weaponised in our country with BJP-led Narendra Modi government, using it to score narrow political gains and not focusing on just how unsafe the country, especially the cow belt, has become for women at large.

This was witnessed most recently in Sandeshkhali in West Bengal where NCW chairperson Rekha Sharma and the National Commission of Scheduled Castes chairperson Arun Halder were rushed to 24 Parganas to do an on-the-spot investigation (as they did in Jharkhand, too). Both went on to demand the resignation of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Bannerjee and advocated the imposition of President’s rule in the state. In fact, the horrors in Sandeshkhali saw even Prime Minister Modi make an impassioned visit to West Bengal.

In contrast, no such furore was created by BJP on the mounting rape cases taking place in both Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and most recently in the saffron-ruled Rajasthan. In fact, the attempt in all these three states (ruled by the BJP) has been to brush the rape cases, especially against Dalit women, under the carpet. Worse still, those who raise their voices against rising rape cases, even as  NCRB data shows a woman is being raped every 18 minutes in India, find the police lodging FIRs against them.

To cite two recent examples. When UP Congress leader Ajay Rai accused the government of shielding the accused in the BHU gang rape case because they were members of BJP, the police filed an FIR against him. In the same way, the UP police filed a series of FIRs against 18 student leaders of BHU for organising dharnas protesting police inaction and filing FIRS against the alleged rapists. And when the alleged rapists were finally arrested, they were put in judicial remand and not in police remand where they would be open to questioning by the police.

Another horrific incident recently surfaced  in Rajasthan, which is no less ghastly than Sandeshkhali, where a former commissioner and chairperson of the Sirohi Municipal Corporation Council have accused of gang-raping 20 women under the guise of providing them with employment in anganwadis.

In mid-February this year, a heinous crime was committed against an eight-month old pregnant woman who was gang-raped and burnt alive in the town of Morena in Madhya Pradesh. Admitted to a hospital in Gwalior, the child died in the womb while the victim was struggling for her life. The woman’s husband had allegedly raped another woman and the pregnant woman was trying to mediate with her when three men proceeded to gang-rape her and then poured petrol on her and set her on fire.

The Prime Minister had once described Delhi as being ‘the rape capital’ of India. The fact is that India, at present, enjoys the dubious distinction of being described as ‘the rape capital’ of the world. The reason for this is that the alleged rapists, more often than not, due to their money and muscle power or because of their political clout, succeed in getting off lightly in a court of law.

An international outcry against the Jharkhand incident is bound to adversely impact India’s image abroad and impact revenues earned from the tourism industry.

But for a party that keeps pushing the `Beti Padhao, Beti Bachao’ (Save Daughters, Educate Daughters) line, surely it is imperative for the BJP government to provide a crime-free environment to our daughters.

The writer is an independent journalist. The views are personal.