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UP GANG-RAPE

Caste system on focus again

Independent.co.uk
The horror that fell like darkness upon Katra Sadatganj was contained within the photograph that Sohan fumbled from his pocket. It was an inch square and showed two young girls, one dressed in green, the other in vibrant pink, hanging from a tree on the edge of the village. The girls' heads tilted slightly downwards where the nooses fashioned from their own scarves dug into their throats. One of them was Sohan's daughter, the other a niece.
Sohan Lal, 55, is a tiny bird of a man and his frame shook as he sobbed. No words could explain what he had felt shortly before sunrise on Wednesday when he was taken to the orchard of 13 mango trees and shown what had befallen the two cousins.
India is once again reeling. Eighteen months after the gang rape and murder of a physiotherapy student in Delhi reverberated around the world and set in motion an unprecedented debate about the safety of women, the country is confronting more horror.
At around 7:00pm on Tuesday, Sohan's daughter, Murti, and his niece Pushpa, the two of them aged between 12 and 14, according to the family, had gone to the fields to relieve themselves. This was the usual practice said the family; like hundreds of millions of Indians, Sohan's family had no proper lavatory and they visited the surrounding land under the sliver of privacy provided by darkness. A woman would always be accompanied by a sister or friend.
But on Tuesday, the two girls did not return. When the family reported them missing to the police, they were told to go away and may even have been abused about their low-caste status. Finally, they were directed to the spreading mango trees a few hundred metres from their home. The girls had been seized, gang raped and hanged. A post-mortem examination concluded they had been alive when the nooses were put around their necks.
It was reported that five people had
now been detained over the attack -the three suspects and two policemen. The case has been passed on to India's federal investigative agency. India's new Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set up a rape crisis unit.
Sohan's family belongs to the Maurya caste, which sits close to the very bottom of India's traditional social structure. By contrast, the three accused attackers - brothers Pappu, Awadhesh and Urvesh Yadav - and members of the police force, are from the Yadav caste.
While technically also a lower caste, the Yadavs are powerful across large
swathes of northern India and in Katra Sadatganj they are considered the dominant group. Lower-caste villagers said whenever there was a dispute with a Yadav, the police would always side with the Yadavs.
The attack has drawn attention to the dark reality of life for millions in rural India - a place where caste still remains the dominant determiner of how someone will live, work and marry. Like the family of Sohan, an estimated 620 million Indians -around half the population - are every day obliged to engage in so-called open defecation because of the lack of proper sanitation.
Campaigners point out the huge social and economic costs to a country where girls are dissuaded form going to school because there are insufficient lavatories, and the stigma and dangers confronted by those obliged to squat in the dust.
Meanwhile, groups that represent lower-caste communities and Dalits, which were once called untouchable, have collected mounting evidence of just how vulnerable women from these castes are to sexual attacks.
Beena Pallical of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, said police routinely refused to investigate such cases. Often, she said, attacks would take place after a young women from a lower-caste community took up a place in college or something else a dominant caste considered inappropriate
Sohan hopes for justice for the daughter he lost, the fourth of five children. He said he had paid for Murti to go to a local privately run school where she studied Hindi, English and Sanskrit.
"She liked studying English," he said. "And when she completed school she wanted to get a job. “