Every 3 hours, there is a rape in Uttar Pradesh

UP cops function with impunity while the political class pays only lip service, neither of which provides succour to victims of rape and their families

Wednesday's broad daylight abduction, gang-rape and murder of two minor Dalit girls, whose bodies were found hanging from a tree in Tammolinpurwa village of Uttar Pradesh's Lakhimpur-Kheri district (barely 200 km from the state capital), is not the first heinous incident of its kind in the country's most populous state. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)'s 2021 report, UP witnessed a rape every three hours.

That much for the much-hyped 'Mahila Shakti Mission' and 'Beti Bachao' campaign and the talk around it by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on "women's safety". What went unnoticed was an almost equally heinous incident of attempted abduction and molestation of another minor girl in Moosepur village not far from Tamolinpurwa in the same district barely 48 hours earlier. It was only after the poor girl died on Friday (September 16) night, leading to public outrage, that the culprits were arrested. Even then, they were booked under Section 304 of IPC, which deals with culpable homicide.

The local cops of Bhira Police Station dismissed it as a case of "eve-teasing" and a minor scuffle without caring to initiate action against two young boys who openly attempted to kidnap the poor girl from her doorstep—failing to succeed in their attempt. The culprits beat her mercilessly and her mother when she intervened to save her daughter.

The record shows that UP Police has displayed similar apathy and insensitivity in two infamous gang-rape cases – one in Unnao involving ruling BJP MLA Kuldeep Sengar in 2017 and the even more reprehensible Hathras gang-rape in 2020. It was only after the suo motto intervention of the Allahabad High Court that the administration and cops got into action in both cases.

The new laws enacted in the aftermath of the ghastly Nirbhaya case also seem to have minimal impact on UP's crimes against women. Other than the apparent lip service of successive governments, if there was one glaring reason for the unabated rise in rapes in UP, it was the insensitive attitude of a corrupt police force which enjoys full patronage in all political regimes.

In 2014 when the state was ruled by a Samajwadi Party government led by Akhilesh Yadav, two young girls were found hanging from a tree in a village in western UP's Budaun district in an almost similar manner as the bodies of two minor girls in Lakhimpur-Kheri now. In both incidents, the victims were Dalits, who were gang-raped before being strangulated to death and hung from the nearest tree after that.

And just as the then state government moved heaven and earth to dismiss the crime as a "suicide", the present ruling dispensation also initially tried to paint the same story in Lakhimpur-Kheri. But just as street protests compelled the Akhilesh Yadav government to order the registration of an FIR against the named culprits, in Lakhimpur-Kheri, too, FIR was lodged only after loud public outrage.

Much like the Lakhimpur-Kheri case, the post-mortem report in Budaun had also confirmed "rape and murder." And just as six culprits – five belonging to the minority community – have been booked and put behind bars now, three young men belonging to a Yadav family plus two Yadav constables were put in the dock by the Akhilesh Yadav government too.

However, unlike Budaun, where top opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi, Mayawati, and Ram Vilas Paswan, made it a point to visit the family of the victims, today, the opposition was content with more lip service or tweet service.

Even BSP supremo Mayawati, who has thrived on the strength of the Dalit vote, did not care to do anything beyond routine oral condemnation of the incident. She detailed her party MLC Bhimrao Ambedkar to visit Lakhimpur and hand over a memorandum to the district magistrate seeking Rs 1 crore compensation for the family and a government job for the victims' brother. Samajwadi Party women's cell chief Juhie Singh met the aggrieved family, assuring them all help. Her party president Akhilesh Yadav chose to tweet, as did his uncle and Pragatisheel Party president Shivpal Yadav, or for that matter, Rashtriya Lok Dal chief Jayant Chaudhary.

Even Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi, who has repeatedly failed to keep her word of camping in UP to resuscitate her party in the state, preferred to complete the ritual of issuing a tweet. Her brother Rahul Gandhi, who is on the Bharat Jodo Yatra, was the only politician other than Mayawati who called the incident one of "rape and murder". All others chose to desist from using the word 'rape' in their respective tweets. For whatever reason, deputy chief ministers Brijesh Pathak and Keshav Prasad Maurya described the incident as "murder". The chief minister's office issued a press release hailing Yogi Adityanath for bringing the "culprits "to book within 24 hours.

The Nirbhaya case had also given rise to a law whereby the concerned police officials were to be taken to task, and FIRs lodged against them for neglect or apathy in taking prompt cognisance of complaints about physical torment, molestation or criminal assault of women. There were hardly any cases in UP where cops have been charged with criminal liability, despite their having been visibly callous or insensitive in lodging cases of crimes against women. In such cases, the unwritten immunity granted to cops has only emboldened them to defy the law of which, ironically, they are supposed to be the custodians. As for the political class, it begins and ends with lip service, which provides no succour to the hapless women and little girls who are, sadly, always at the receiving end.

(Sharat Pradhan is a journalist and author based in Lucknow)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.