Kidnapped, drugged and confined to a room for weeks, repeatedly gang raped, and forced to eat beef – this is the hellish ordeal that a Class XI student has undergone in Bareilly, West UP. Two brothers, Babu Hassan and Til Hassan, have been arrested for this crime.  

This news appeared in a leading Hindi daily Dainik Jagran on 15 Aug, and is almost completely absent from English news media. The student was kidnapped on 13 July when she left school, drugged and when she woke up found herself in a dark room. She was repeatedly raped by the two brothers who kept injecting her with sedatives to prevent her from raising an alarm. She was also forcefully fed beef. When the neighbours suspected something, they finally reported the matter  to the police, who came and rescued the girl.

UP – a living hell in Bharat

As law & order has gone to the dogs, the social order too has crumbled in Uttar Pradesh – it is the law of the jungle which prevails there now. Lets look at some of the other cases that have come to light from Bareilly district alone in recent weeks:

1.) 23 July: Lady who had gone out to buy vegetables was kidnapped and gang raped. Main accused, Sameer Dikshit, is an Associate Professor in a private college and he kidnapped, assaulted & raped the woman after getting drunk along with his friends. Dikshit’s wife is a judicial officer, and his father is also a retired judicial officer  – he tried to threaten police using these connections after he was arrested.

2.) 5 Aug: A widow and her daughters take refuge in a shrine to escape rapists. A jholachap (quack doctor – name not provided in media report) first conned the mother out of Rs 3 lakh by promising to get her daughters railway jobs. Then he took one daughter to Moradabad on the job pretext, drugged her in a guest house and then gang raped her, while also making a video. The girl was then blackmailed on the basis of the video & further exploited. Now, the gang is threatening to kill the woman and her daughters.

3.) 11 Aug: Pregnant married woman abducted from highway and gang raped by cousin brother and his friends. The woman who had gone to take medicine was offered a lift home, and then gangraped at gunpoint.

4.) 3 Aug: More than 50 girls studying in the Inter College in Dunka village decided to stop attending school due to fear of sexual harassment by goons who would pass lewd comments, play vulgar music and make obscene gestures at the girls, and who had even started ramming their bikes into the girls’ cycles and encircling them. When school authorities failed to take any action, villagers had to protest en masse at the local police station before 2 people were arrested.

5.) 27 Aug:  3 teenaged cousin sisters, aged 13, 14 and 15, who had gone to relieve themselves in the open vanished from near their house, their bodies turning up in the Bhakra river some distance away on Saturday. Baini Ram, father of the 15-year-old, said, “Our family has an enmity with a few other villagers over property. It appears that our daughters have been killed over this property dispute.”

This is the state of UP today – a place where a girl is not safe while going to school, buying vegetables, going to defecate or even in her own home. The victims cut across caste and class lines, with an overwhelming majority being Hindu. It is the criminal negligence of the UP Government led by Akhilesh Yadav which has brought things to this sorry pass – Akhilesh Yadav has blood on his hands. The damage which his regime of lawlessness has done to UP will take years to repair – and the harmful psychological impact on a generation of young girls is probably irreparable.

Isn’t this a more serious social issue than the cow vigilantism which has caught the imagination of our liberal intellectuals and the editorial class? The ease with which our media moguls have allowed Akhilesh Yadav, and the quasi-criminal Yadav clan which runs the Samajwadi Party political mafia, off the hook for their dereliction of duty is mind boggling. When the CM of UP gives an interview in the wake of the Bulandshahr rape tragedy and says “Some incidents can’t be stopped..People play politics over incidents.”, the Times Group interviewer just lets this atrocious comment pass! Not one senior journalist has asked any tough questions to either Akhilesh or his father Mulayam on why UP is today worse than a failed state in sub-Saharan Africa?