Dalit girl commits suicide in Bihar after alleged gang rape

Even as the agitation over the alleged gang rape and murder of a 20-year-old woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras rages on, a Dalit teenager from Bihar’s Gaya district died by suicide on Friday (October ) after allegedly being gang raped by four men, the police said.

The girl’s parents have named three of the four accused as Rahul Kumar, Chintu Kumar, and Chandan Kumar. All three have been arrested. The fourth accused is yet to be identified, the police said.

The autopsy was done at Gaya Medical College and the results are awaited.

A Dalit woman was earlier allegedly gang raped and murdered by four men from a so-called “upper caste” community in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras. The twenty-year-old woman died on Tuesday at a hospital in Delhi due to multiple fractures, paralysis and severe spinal injury after she was assaulted by four men from her village on September 14.

The UP police took away her body, drove to her village and cremated the body forcibly, with the family locked up in their house. The woman’s family alleged that the police had been slow to respond to their complaint. The incident has drawn public anger against the UP government.

On Tuesday, a 22-year-old Dalit woman succumbed to her injuries after she was allegedly gang-raped by two men in UP’s Balrampur district. The family said the incident happened when the woman left home in the morning to get enrolled in a college. The accused allegedly abducted her on the way, raped her and sent her home in a rickshaw in the evening in an injured state.

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Uttar Pradesh has reported a sudden spurt in crime against women which has united the opposition and civil society against the Yogi Adityanath government, demanding justice for the families of victims and the chief minister’s resignation for not handling the cases well.

More incidents of crime against women were reported in different parts of Uttar Pradesh which has snowballed into a political issue and may have a bearing on the three-phase Bihar Assembly elections starting October 28.

BJP-Janata Dal’s alliance government in Bihar will be tested as the opposition parties, including Congress and RJD, are likely to corner Chief Minister Nitish Kumar over women’s safety, atrocities against Dalits and the three controversial Farm Acts besides the state government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent migrant crisis.