Being a woman and moving around in Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s Uttar Pradesh (UP) seems to be a mortally scaring thought. While the Union Home Ministry records show that rape cases in India’s most populous state of more than 200 million people, which sends the largest number of 80 lawmakers to the national parliament, have seen a quantum jump of 55 per cent over the previous year, the state government and the police force, possibly the largest in India and pathetic by all standards, continue to drag their feet through one-line statements and knee-jerk reactions of setting up teams and taking the PR route of “CM blasted officials, probe is in the right direction”.
Sadly, the ground reality is drastically different.
Sample this: The nude, bloodied and badly brutalised body of a 32-year-old woman was found last Thursday morning in the premises of a government primary school at Balsinghkheda Mohanlalganj near Lucknow, at a place just a few kilometres from where former US president Bill Clinton was to arrive. None of the senior officials rushed to the spot. For policemen, the recovery of bodies is a routine thing, says DIG (Lucknow) Navneit Sikera who, while speaking to IANS, said he “failed to realise the proportion of the crime” when informed about it early last Thursday morning. “I thought it was just another intimation of a dead body having been recovered,” he mused while also justifying his absence from the crime scene for more than 24 hours. For a man who endlessly speaks of his women’s powerline initiative, Sikera offers a feeble explanation — he was busy supervising the high-profile visit of Clinton as he was the nodal officer for the security liaison!
His beaming and smiling pictures on the Clinton-Akhilesh meeting sadly bore testimony to his misplaced and hyped-up concern about women’s safety. Even as horrifying pictures of the nude woman, with blood splattered all around, went viral in social media, all district police officers, barring the inspector and sub-inspector of Mohanlalganj, were busy with “the high-profile visit and other errands”. Little has anyone explained so far why the police did not even have the basic decency of wrapping up the victim in a sheet of cloth and preventing mobile phone users from taking pictures with complete impunity to norms. And now the police say they will arrest people found guilty of posting these pictures on social networking sites. The crime scene was not secured and curious onlookers and angry villagers were allowed to trample upon crucial pieces of evidence, while rains completed the callous handling of the ghastly crime.
The police also botched up on initial leads as forensic teams, dog squads and fingerprint experts were brought to the crime scene many hours later. No wonder that so far, the only lead with the police is that “more than one person was involved in the crime”. On Sunday, the police even reversed their earlier theories and said the crime was committed “by one single person — a sex-obsessed private security guard and that there was neither gang rape, nor rape”. According to ADG Sutapa Sanyal, overseeing the probe, the severe wounds on the body of the victim were “inflicted by the motorcycle key”!
As if the police flip-flops were not enough, comments made by Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, his brother and UP’s PWD Minister Shivpal Singh Yadav and Rajya Sabha member Naresh Agarwal added insult to injury. Mulayam said UP had the lowest incidents of crime against women in India, while his brother Shivpal and MP Agarwal attributed such crimes to rising population!
As heart-rending details of the incident emerge, the anger only grows among many women activists in the city. The rape victim was a widow who tragically lost her young husband a few years back to a kidney ailment. She had donated him a kidney, but failed to save him. She then got the job of a lab technician, in place of her husband, for a paltry monthly salary of Rs4,500 (Dh274) — a job that enabled her to bring up her 13-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter. The father of the dead woman broke down several times after identifying her body. “She never had happy times in her life,” he recounted as tears rolled down his wrinkled cheeks. Worried about the future of his grandchildren and horrified at the fate of his daughter, he said he had often told her to leave the job and come home, only to be told that she had a dream to realise!
Little did she know that this was UP, a land where dreams turn into nightmares with the blink of an eye. Investigations reveal, she was lured by security guard Ram Sevak Yadav, masquerading as a property dealer. The victim was desperately looking for a rented accommodation for her children. UP Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Laxmikant Bajpai said that since the May 28 Badaun rape incident, more than 208 rapes have taken place in the state. “While incidents like these shake the collective conscience of the society for some time, I am aghast at the fact that despite repeated incidents, the state government seems to be living in a denial mode,” Bajpai said. Madhu Garg, a prominent women rights activist in the state capital, said her head hung in shame and her heart went out to the victims and their families.
“This is the limit of brutality and numbs your senses on how animal instincts can take over someone,” she said while recalling how badly the Balsinghkheda Mohanlalganj victim was injured.
Doctors who conducted the post-mortem on the victim said they were shocked to see the injuries, which “clearly were much more than those suffered by Nirbhaya, the 2012 Delhi gang-rape victim”.
What is even more shocking is the attitude of the police, said Roop Rekha Verma, a prominent social activist and former vice-chancellor of Lucknow University. “In many instances, the police does not even register cases,” she said.
Government officials, however, said that all was being done and that separate cells to deal with crimes against women were being created in all districts and that security was being stepped up. This seems too little for a vast state like UP, others say. While some may feel that I am swayed away by the latest incident, I must admit I am. Anyone present at the crime scene would have been.
But I am also a concerned parent, a family man whose heart shudders everytime women of our family step out. I, like many other concerned people, want the government to send chills down the spines of criminals and allow peace-loving citizens to move around freely and without fear!
— IANS
