KATRA SHAHADATGANJ, India — When a farm laborer in this hardscrabble village in northern India went to the police last week to report that his daughter and her cousin had gone missing, a constable slapped him in the face and sent him away. Hours later he found the two girls, hanging by their necks from a mango tree. A post-mortem found they had been raped. Five men, two of them police officers, were arrested for a crime that underscored the enduring culture of sexual assault in India and the capacity for appalling violence between Hindu castes. In India — where a rape is reported every 21 minutes on average — the story has slipped off the front pages already. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi, serving his first week in office, made no public comment on the case. One of Modi's biggest challenges will be making a break from the ineffectual responses of governments to heinous crimes like this and the gang rape and murder in December 2012 of a young woman in the capital, which provoked a rash of street protests, much of it over the authorities' apparent indifference. “When these incidents occur, like the one in Delhi in 2012, there is public outrage,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch. “Then the state responds, but it gets left behind at the level of rhetoric.” Four of the five suspects arrested in last week's case are from the powerful Yadav community, a land-owning Hindu caste that holds significant political clout in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Police declined to confirm reports that three had confessed. The victims were, like Modi, from a lowly caste. They were Shakyas, by tradition peasant farmers who are often vulnerable to exploitation by the Yadavs. “The nature of it shouts out caste atrocity,” said Kavita Krishnan, a prominent women's rights activist and left-wing politician. “It's meant to have a terrorizing effect.” Caste divisions, baked into society over generations despite official efforts to remove them, could be as much a problem for the prime minister as the tensions between Hindus and minority Muslims that critics fear he could inflame. Critics fault Modi, a Hindu nationalist, for pursuing a majoritarian agenda: More than two-thirds of his Cabinet ministers belong to a powerful Hindu grassroots movement, raising doubts that he can close social rifts and govern in the interests of all Indians. While inter-caste violence is an age-old symptom of social oppression, it is also a sign of social change as marginalized groups seek democratic rights and a share in India's rising prosperity. “There's a sense of changing India,” said Krishnan, seeing in the violence “a need to reinforce caste hierarchies.” After the two young cousins were raped and strung up in Katra Shahadatganj, villagers refused to let their bodies be cut down until the men they accuse of the killings were arrested. Images of the girls — still roped to sturdy branches, a crowd gathered below — went around the world, transforming what would have become a forgotten crime into a symbol of sexual and caste oppression in India's most populous state. It was just after 7 p.m. on Tuesday when an uncle of the girls heard their cries as he was coming in from the fields. He flashed a torch and spotted four men, recognizing one. He confronted them, but fled after being threatened with a handgun, he told Reuters on Saturday at the victims' family home. The uncle and the girls' father went to the local police post to report the girls missing. Indian law does not allow rape victims and their relatives to be identified by the media. There, they were asked their caste and told that the person the uncle had recognized by torchlight was an “honest man.” “I fell to their feet,” said the father, pleading with them to find his daughter and niece. That's when he was slapped. “They said the girls will reach your home in a couple of hours,” said the father, lying outside his cramped brick house, his face a mask of grief and exhaustion. Katra Shahadatganj is a dirt-poor village like so many in Uttar Pradesh. Surender Sakhya, a farmer from a nearby district, said the Yadavs get protection from the police. “And it's not just police, but political parties,” he said, complaining that Yadavs steal the crops of many farmers. All five suspects were being held in a jail in the nearby town of Budaun. A guard and three other officers said it was not possible to talk to the men. Officials at the local magistrates court said the suspects did not yet have a lawyer. Their relatives had fled the village, and it was not immediately possible to contact them. The grief-stricken mother of one of the girls, veiled in a magenta sari, was clear: “I want them hanged,” she said. — Reuters
