New Delhi: The Ranchi Police has arrested eight persons accused in the brutal gang rape of four school girls in Pakur district and hunt is on for one more person, who is absconding.
Early this week, miscreants at Lobda village in Pakur district, forcibly took away the girls, aged between 12 and 15, from their hostel after locking all the teachers inside a room. The tribal minor girls, who were staying in the hostel of a Christian missionary school, were then gang raped by nine men at a secluded place.
Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren has offered support to the victims. Terming the incident as shocking, he said, “The government will take the responsibility for the minor girls’ education and provide them monetary help.”
But whether the verbal promise is actually kept, only time will tell. For, such tall promises have often been made by political leaders and easily forgotten as in the case of Gudiya, the five-year-old, who was kidnapped and raped brutally by two men in east Delhi’s Gandhi Nagar area in mid-April.
Having contracted infection from foreign objects inserted into her body, the innocent child battled for life for weeks at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
The Delhi’s government’s Child Welfare Committee (CWC) had then directed: “Gudiya and her family members will be provided shelter at the YWCA shelter home in Central Delhi.”
Ever since, it has been one long journey from shelter home to the hospital for her family. But on Tuesday, when Gudiya’s father got her back from AIIMS, they were denied permission to enter the shelter home premises.
Gudiya’s father said, “We were shocked when we returned in the evening. They told us to find some other place. The CWC had told us to stay here for six months, but no amount of explanations and pleadings worked. I even asked to be given just 2-3 days time within which I would make an alternative arrangement. But they remained adamant.
“I called up the office of Women and Child Development Minister Kiran Walia several times, but could neither speak with her, nor got any positive response. Left with no option, we decided to move into the one-room house of a relative in west Delhi’s Uttam Nagar area.”
Despite her condition, Gudiya is now forced to live with 12 other inmates of the family, including five children, who, unaware of her predicament, cajole her to play with them.
The dejected father said, “Various government authorities had made promises that my daughter will be provided all facilities. But here I am struggling to find a proper place for my innocent child, so that she can recover fast.”
Congress President Sonia Gandhi, Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit and many other leaders had visited Gudiya when she lay in hospital. The rapists had inserted a candle and plastic bottle that were extracted from deep inside her body at AIIMS and her wounds have still to be healed.
Pictures of stuffed toys on Gudiya’s stretcher, as she was wheeled into AIIMS, had made front page news in national and international dailies. But in less than four months, focus is lost.
