NEW DELHI: Hathras, a small district in Uttar Pradesh, has become the epicentre for media reportage, political and social activism for the alleged gang-rape victim who died in a Delhi hospital recently.
This isn’t the first time India is seeing protests across the nation over a gang-rape and sexual assault. India has seen brutal rapes and gang-rapes in the past, many of which resulted in a public outcry on the streets.
The most prominent was the 2012 Delhi gang-rape and murder case which involved a rape and fatal assault that occurred on December 16, 2012 in Munirka in south Delhi inside a moving bus. The incident took place when a 23-year-old female physiotherapy intern who was later dubbed ‘Nirbhaya’ (Fearless), was beaten, gang-raped, and brutally tortured in a private bus in which she was travelling with her male friend. Four of the adult convicts were hanged in Tihar jail in March this year.
The infamous incident in 2013 in Mumbai also known as the Shakti Mills gang-rape, where a 22-year-old photojournalist, who was interning with a magazine in Mumbai, was gang-raped by five people, including a juvenile. The incident occurred on August 22, 2013, when she had gone to the deserted Shakti Mills compound, near Mahalaxmi in south Mumbai, with a male colleague on an assignment.
Earlier in 1996, a 25-year-old law student, was found strangled in her uncle’s residence. She had been raped, struck 14 times with a motorcycle helmet, and finally strangled with a wire by Santosh Kumar Singh, son of a former IPS officer, who was later arrested and convicted for the crime.
In November 2019, the gang-rape and murder of a 26-year-old veterinary doctor in Shamshabad, near Hyderabad, sparked outrage across India. Her body was found in Shadnagar on November 28, 2019, the day after she was murdered. Police found that her body was doused with kerosene and then burnt. Four suspects were arrested and were killed in a police encounter on December 6, 2019, under a bridge on Bangalore-Hyderabad national highway, while they allegedly tried to flee from police custody.
In 2018, the infamous Kathua rape case made headlines when an 8-year-old girl was abducted, raped, and murdered in Rasana village near Kathua in Jammu & Kashmir. The girl disappeared for a week before her body was discovered by villagers a kilometre away from the village. The incident made national news with protests across the country.
In April 2019, a nine-year-old girl was allegedly raped and killed by a man in Vile Parle area in Mumbai. The girl’s body was found inside a public toilet at Nehru Nagar area in Vile Parle following which the accused was arrested.
Crimes against women increased 7.3 per cent from 2018 to 2019, and crimes against Scheduled Castes also went up 7.3 per cent in the same period, according to the annual National Crime Record Bureau’s ‘Crime in India 2019’ report released on Tuesday. In terms of absolute numbers, Uttar Pradesh reported the highest number of cases in both these categories.