Child rape cases fuel protests across country

Days after a lawmaker from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party was arrested in connection with a teenager’s rape, a sexual attack on an 11-year-old girl was reported yesterday in Gujarat, the latest in a string of cases that have sparked protests across the country.Protests calling for justice were held in several cities, echoing the mass rallies against sexual violence in 2012 and piling pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who must hold elections by May 2019.Modi has promised to take action.Activists accuse authorities of failing to protect women and of moving too slowly to investigate and arrest perpetrators.The protests were fuelled in part by the arrest of Kuldeep Singh Sengar, a BJP lawmaker from Uttar Pradesh last week in connection with the rape of a teenager.Police only brought a case against the powerful politician last week after the young victim attempted to burn herself alive outside state Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s residence.The next day, her father, who had been in police custody, died from injuries he sustained in an alleged beating.In the southern city of Thiruvananthapuram, protesters formed a human chain, while in Mumbai, hundreds, including film celebrities, called for the death penalty for rapists.In New Delhi, they called for rape trials to be completed in six months.In Surat, where the latest case took place, men and women held a silent candlelight march.Gujarat is Modi’s home state, where he was the chief minister from 2001 until he took national office in 2014.“The body was recovered on April 6 by the side of a highway and, according to a postmortem report, the girl was sexually assaulted and murdered on April 5,” Surat’s Police Commissioner Satish Sharma said.He said the victim – who was 11 years old, according to the postmortem – had not yet been identified and that police from neighbouring states have been asked to help find her family.“We have put our best teams in place with all senior police officials. To nab the criminals we first need to identify the body,” Sharma said.The postmortem revealed the girl had been strangled and smothered, with 86 signs of minor injuries, including sexual assault, he said.Some of the injuries were old.Details have also emerged in a separate case of an eight-year-old girl belonging to a nomadic tribe that roams the mountains of Jammu and Kashmir who was kidnapped, drugged and held in captivity as eight men assaulted her.There had been little progress made in the case until activists stepped up their campaign for an investigation.“Let’s not pretend that these are all isolated cases and happened out of the blue,” film actress and director Nandita Das said at the Mumbai protest.“We have brought it upon ourselves as a society and we have to find a solution for it.”Protesters across cities carried placards reading “Punish the guilty” and “Justice for the Kathua and Unnao victims,” referring to sexual attacks in Kashmir’s Kathua region, and the gang-rape of the 16-year-old girl in Unnao in Uttar Pradesh.In both cases, the police have been criticised for being slow to investigate, while the government has been slammed for protecting the accused.The United Nations is among the international bodies that have condemned the problem.“We are deeply concerned about the prevalence of gender-based violence, including sexual violence against women and girls, which we are witnessing in India,” Yuri Afanasiev, the UN resident co-ordinator in India, said in a statement last week.India registered about 40,000 rape cases in 2016, up from 25,000 in 2012, government data show.Rights activists say thousands more go unreported.