http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2545138/Go-enjoy-What-tribal-elder-told-men-latest-Indian-gang-rape-victim-tied-bamboo-platform-assaulted-view-entire-village.html
'Go and enjoy yourselves': What tribal elder said before Indian gang rape victim was tied to a platform to be assaulted in view of entire village because of affair with a Muslim
- Woman, 20, sentenced to 'gang rape' by village court in east India
- Punished for having a relationship with a man of another religion
- She was tied to a platform and assaulted in front of the entire village
- The village head told the 13 men to 'go enjoy yourselves' after 'ruling'
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The 20-year-old Indian woman who was gang-raped by 13 men was sexually assaulted while tied to a raised bamboo platform so her entire village could watch the torture, it emerged today.
The head of the village, who led the kangaroo court which sentenced the woman to the savage rape as punishment for her falling in love with a man from another village, told the other judges to ‘go enjoy yourselves’.
It was previously reported that she had been raped repeatedly in a hut, but today it emerged that she had been publicly humiliated on a platform set up close to the village headman's hut in the Suri district, West Bengal, the Times of India reported.
Scroll down for video
Abhorrent: The 20-year-old woman, pictured
arriving at a hospital in Western Bengal, was raped by more than a
dozen men while tied to a bamboo platform in front of the entire village
Police arrest around a dozen people in
connection with the gang rape of a 20-year-old woman from Birbhum
District in West Bengal, India.
Disgusting: The village elder, who led the kangaroo court, told the other 'judges' to 'go enjoy themselves' with the 20-year-old
As the woman remained in intensive care today, further horrific details of the gang-rape punishment emerged.
Villagers told the Times of India that after the kangaroo court ordered her to be sexually savaged after she was caught sitting with her Muslim lover in another village, she was dragged onto a raised bamboo platform 'so that the gang rape was viewed by the entire village, children included.'
The head man, named as Boloi Murdy, who convened the makeshift court in the courtyard of his home, at first ordered the woman or her family to pay a fine of 50,000 rupees (£485).
Murdy is reported to have told the men who gathered to watch the cruel spectacle: 'If the family does not pay up, go and enjoy yourselves.'
The terrified woman and her lover had sat tied to separate trees as the 'court' discussed her 'crime'. Her lover was released after he promised to pay his fine, but the woman was not spared because her family did not have the money to pay immediately.
Crime scene: The woman was tied to a tree (pictured) before she was dragged to a shed and raped
Unspeakable abuse: The woman, seen surrounded by
family members as she is escorted into hospital, was locked in a shed
and raped overnight by 13 men, ten of which had been 'judges' in the
kangaroo court which sentenced her
The dozen men were tied together with ropes as they were taken to a police station
Inhumane: The 13 men pointed out by the woman is said to have been 'teenagers and men as old as her father'
Disgusting crime: Some of the 13 suspects arrives in at a police station after being arrested
She was tied down to the bamboo platform and then, according to villagers who spoke to the Times of India, 'her cries rent the air all night but no-one stepped forward to help her Even her family, who lives 50 meters away, could not rescue her.'
The paper said the woman's family was not given even a night's time to arrange for money to pay the fine and once the headman ordered rape it was free for all.
'Among those who raped her were teenagers and some old enough to be her father,' said a villager. 'Almost the entire village - including children - had joined the kangaroo court.
'All of them hailed it as the correct move.'
The village has no electricity or school and, says the paper, the administration has always been wary of interfering with tribal traditions, leaving local rulers to live by their own laws.
'Even on Thursday, a day after the gang-rape by up to 13 people, the village didn't show any hint of repentance,' says the paper.
'The women, in fact, barracked police, insisting the men had done nothing wrong and that the woman had to be punished.'
Even the authorities have shown indifference to the woman's treatment.
The paper claims that at first the police did not seek custody of the accused men, allowing them to go free until their court appearances - which is unprecedented in gang-rape cases. Later they decided to hold the group in jail for 14 days.
To add to the woman's shameful treatment, the public prosecutor did not even turn up in court because it was a holiday and no government official has bothered to meet the woman's family or visit the scene of the crime.
Villagers were heard shouting that they would never allow the young woman or her family to return to the village, accusing the victim of framing the accused men because she had been ordered to leave the village if she continued with her affair.
A local politician, Mukul Roy, in a statement said: 'The government is firm and will take strictest action against the culprits. It is a social malaise and we shall combat it politically, socially and administratively.'
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13 HINDUS GANG RAPED A HINDU WOMAN FOR AGREEING TO MARRY A MUSLIM - JAI HIND!
India News
For Defying Village Rules in India, A Penalty of Rape
Practice Shows Limits of New Legislation Aimed at Protecting Women in Face of Deep Cultural Resistance
Feb. 20, 2014 10:46 p.m. ET
A Hindu woman said she was gang-raped in this shed in Subalpur, India.
Associated Press
SUBALPUR, India—When the elders in
this small Hindu farming village discovered last month that a local
woman intended to marry a Muslim, their reaction was swift and savage.
The
village chief and 12 others dragged the 20-year-old woman to a shed and
gang-raped her, the local police allege. She and her suitor were then
tied to a tree overnight, witnesses say, and the village council fined
them the next day.
Thirteen men, including those in custody above left,
are suspected of gang-raping a Hindu woman as punishment for her
agreeing to marry a Muslim outsider.
Such rough justice is common across
wide swaths of rural India, where local leaders often ignore the law to
enforce traditional social norms that run counter to more-liberal views
now gaining ground in India's cities.
More
than a year after the December 2012 fatal gang rape of a student on a
New Delhi bus, which shocked India and drew global attention, the
Subalpur case shows the limits of new legislation aimed at protecting
women in the face of deep cultural resistance.
The
woman reported the gang rape to police. Her alleged attackers—their
lawyer says they are innocent—are in jail. Still, her family fears
retaliation from villagers. "Her entire life has been ruined," her
mother says. "Maybe the best thing to do was to keep quiet."
For
hundreds of millions of women in India's impoverished countryside,
conservative local leaders and informal village councils have long
dictated everything from whom they can marry to what they can wear.
India Real Time
These informal councils, which are
separate from state-sanctioned local governments, can't legally rule on
village disputes or other matters of law. But the penalties they
illegally impose can range from fines and ostracism to forced marriage,
rape and death.
"Urban India is
changing. But our villages remain centuries behind," says Shamina
Shafiq, a member of India's National Commission for Women. Local
councils are "one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the road to
progress for women."
In 2012, an
informal village council in Uttar Pradesh state proposed that only
arranged marriages be permitted and that single women be barred from
having cellphones or wearing jeans. Central-government officials
condemned that move. P. Chidambaram, home minister at the time, told
reporters in 2012 that "there is no place for such diktats in a
democratic society."
But the government
has struggled to curb the extralegal councils. Authorities say it is
hard to gather statistics about the councils' actions because villagers
generally don't report them to outsiders.
In
response to widespread reports of torture by the councils, the Law
Commission of India in 2012 drafted legislation to clamp down on them,
but Parliament has yet to consider it.
Men can be victims, too. Police in
Rajasthan state say a man from the state filed a complaint late last
year alleging that villagers held him in a cage in neighboring Haryana
state for three months and sodomized him in retribution for his eloping
with a married Haryana woman. Rajasthan police say they transferred the
case to the village where the alleged attack happened; police in the
village say they haven't received the transfer request.
Women
are the most common target of the village councils, say women's rights
groups, and the Subalpur case illustrates the extent to which the
councils still dominate rural women's lives.
Subalpur,
in West Bengal state, is a grain-farming village of roughly 30 families
about 125 miles from the nearest city, Kolkata. The closest police
station is about 13 miles away in the town of Labpur.
Late
one afternoon last month, the young woman's boyfriend arrived at her
home in the village and proposed to her around sundown, according to the
woman's police complaint. She agreed.
A
village leader saw the man, a Muslim, enter the house, villagers say,
and word of his engagement to the Hindu woman soon spread.
Later
that evening, community leaders burst into the home—a one-room dwelling
plastered with Bollywood movie posters and portraits of Hindu gods—the
woman said in a complaint filed with police in Labpur, which has
jurisdiction over Subalpur.
The village
chief "directed" villagers to "enjoy" the woman as punishment, according
to her allegations in a police report, which was reviewed by The Wall
Street Journal. The chief, Balai Mardi, allegedly joined in the rape,
police say.
The next morning, police and
witnesses in the village say, elders met in the square to pass judgment
on the couple, who were tied to a nearby palm tree. They imposed an
$800 fine on the couple for deciding to marry outside the community.
Dozens
of villagers, children in tow, watched the proceedings, the witnesses
say. A half-dozen village residents the Journal interviewed in the days
after the alleged assault either deny there was a rape or say they were
sleeping and don't know what happened. Most express approval for the
council's fine.
"I think it's a very
lenient punishment for the crime they committed," says Lal Kisku, a
middle-aged village man, of the fine. He says he suspects the woman
faked the rape. She "should have been prepared to face the consequences
of having relations with a man outside her community."
One
of the woman's brothers took her to the Labpur police station by
bicycle. Police there say her blouse was torn, she was bruised and her
underwear was stained with semen when she arrived.
Police
arrested 13 men, including the village chief, on suspicion of
participating in the alleged gang rape. All remain in custody, but none
have been charged. In India, police typically have at least two months
to prepare a charge sheet; suspects are rarely charged during that
period.
Police decline to make the men available for interviews. Dilip Ghosh, the lawyer for the men, says they were framed.
Debasis
Ghose, the police inspector investigating the attack, says that
villagers in the area seldom come to the police, preferring to handle
their affairs based on conservative moral codes handed down over
generations.
"These people have no idea
about their rights, about the universe outside their village," Mr. Ghose
says. "The word of the village elders is often the last word on any
matter."
Rape victims can't be
identified by name under Indian law without their permission. The woman
declines through her mother to comment. Her mother asks that her name
and her daughter's not be used.
Police
in cities point to recent shifts in sex-crime-reporting statistics as
evidence that public dialogue has rapidly altered how urban victims
perceive themselves, particularly in the wake of the 2012 bus gang rape
in India's capital.
In Delhi, more than
1,500 rapes were reported in 2013, up from 706 in 2012. Harassment
reports jumped fivefold from 2012. Delhi police say the increase isn't
due to rising crime rates, but to women's newfound willingness to report
abuse.
In the countryside, it is a
different story. Villagers in the same district as Subalpur say at least
two similar attacks took place in recent years.
Late
last year in Gobra, a village not far from Subalpur, a teenage girl was
raped for dating a man from another community, residents there say. The
village chief says he isn't aware of any such attack.
No
one has registered a formal complaint regarding the alleged attack,
local police say. They say the woman's family left the village,
restraining any efforts to conduct a probe.
The
second assault was in Battala, a village about 50 miles from Subalpur
where electricity arrived only two years ago. One day in August 2010,
Sunita Murmur, then 15, says her Muslim boyfriend was visiting her Hindu
home when local leaders barged in and dragged her outside. "Village
leaders asked me to forget him," says Ms. Mumur, now 19. "I said I
couldn't."
About a dozen men, acting on
the village chief's orders, stripped her naked and paraded her around
the village as punishment for dating a Muslim, she says.
"I
shrieked and shouted," Ms. Murmur says. "But nobody—not even one
person—came forward to help. They all seemed to be enjoying the show."
Ms.
Murmur says the men marched her through three villages before dumping
her, naked and alone, on a nearby mountain. She says she was "scared for
my family" so never approached the police.
Many
villagers took mobile-phone videos of the assault, she says. After at
least one of the videos surfaced later that month in the local news
media, police investigated the matter and arrested 11 men, charging them
with molestation, court documents show.
The
men, free on bail, couldn't be located for comment. Some villagers say
they haven't seen them there for months. A trial in the case is pending
in West Bengal state.
Several residents
of Ms. Murmur's village confirm her account but say they won't testify.
"Everyone knows about this," says a village woman. "But we don't want to
get ourselves involved," she says. "You never know—tomorrow the men may
come after our families."
Informal
village councils have been a legal quandary for some time. In a 2006
ruling in favor of a couple tortured for marrying outside their
community, India's Supreme Court said the village councils' practice of
taking the law into their own hands is "wholly illegal and has to be
ruthlessly stamped out."
In a similar
2011 judgment, the Supreme Court said: "It is time to stamp out these
barbaric, feudal practices which are a slur on our nation."
But
with no new laws to curb councils, "how can you expect people's
mind-sets to change when the law itself hasn't," says Rehana Adib, head
of Astitva, a nonprofit that fights for women's rights in rural India.
"Because there is no real law, people, especially the illiterate masses,
don't find anything wrong with what their local leaders say."
Rural
sex-crime victims continue to be ostracized and often are blamed for
attacks, she says. "Sometimes, they fear for their families. Other
times, they fear they would be shunned if they speak up."
The
Subalpur woman's family, under police protection in a neighboring town,
say they fear retribution. "We will be killed if we go back," says
Sital Murmu, one of the woman's brothers.
The police and family say they don't know where the woman's fiancé is.
The mother, sobbing, says she regrets her daughter's decision to go to the police. "Who will ever want to marry her now?"
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