PRICE OF PREJUDICE
THE DETAILS—FLASHING ACROSS NEWSPAPER HEADLINES AND television screens and circulated over social media—are by now all-too-familiar. Of a young Dalit girl, not yet 20, dragged into the fields, allegedly gang-raped by four upper-caste men, tongue cut, spine broken and left to die. Her mother hears her screams, finds the bleeding daughter, the family rushes first to the police station, then to a hospital in Aligarh, and when her condition takes a turn for the worse, she is shifted to the Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi where, two weeks after her ordeal began, she succumbs to her injuries. Her body is brought back to Hathras and cremated by the police in the dead of the night. Without their consent, says the family. To pre-empt the breakdown of law and order, say the police.
This horror unfolded in the Boolgadhi village of Hathras district in Uttar Pradesh, but it could just as easily have been any other part of the country—Rajasthan, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala or Telangana. On the day the Hathras victim died, a Dalit woman in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district claimed she had been gang-raped by three men. Twenty-four hours later, a 22-year-old Dalit girl was allegedly gang-raped and murdered by two Muslim youths in UP’s Balrampur district. On October 2, a Dalit teenage girl in Bihar’s Gaya district committed suicide after four men allegedly gang-raped her. Only a week later, the state saw a lower court convicting five Gurjar men of gang-raping a 19-year-old Dalit girl in front of her fiance in Rajasthan’s Alwar district last year. In August, a 75-year-old Dalit woman was brutally gang-raped in Ernakulam, Kerala. Mumbai was on boil in August 2019 after a 19-year-old Dalit woman, who was allegedly gang-raped by four of her friends, succumbed to multiple internal injuries in her home town Aurangabad.
The incidents vary only in gruesome detail, the script remains the same. According to the annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), ‘Crimes in India: 2019’, of the 32,033 cases of rape reported in 2019, around 11 per cent of the victims were Dalits. This means 10 Dalit women are raped every day in India. Between 2009 and 2019, while the incidents of rapes across the country).
