A 16-year-old allegedly gang-raped and set on fire by two men in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, has died in a hospital, police told AFP Tuesday.
The girl was a Dalit, the lowest rung in the Hindu caste system who suffer disproportionately high levels of sexual violence in a country with high rates of crime against women.
Dalits — formerly known as “untouchables” — are victims of thousands of attacks each year.
Her death on Monday came less than a week after two Dalit sisters, aged 15 and 17, were found hanging from a tree after being allegedly sexually assaulted and murdered by six men.
Both incidents took place in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, home to about 230 million people, where similar crimes regularly make headlines.
In the latest case the girl from a rural area was allegedly attacked by two men and set on fire early this month.
She was shifted to a hospital in the state capital Lucknow where she succumbed to her injuries on Monday.
“We arrested the accused within two hours of the incident being reported and assured the family of proper follow-up action against the perpetrators,” local police chief Dinesh Kumar Prabhu told AFP.
Prabhu said police had since been deployed around the girl’s house “to check any untoward incident”.
In previous cases low-caste families have been threatened or attacked to stop them testifying.
Activists say police often fail to take seriously accusations made by the marginalised community and that they lack recourse to legal representation.
Last year the Uttar Pradesh authorities’ swift cremation before an autopsy of a Dalit rape victim murdered by an upper-caste Hindu man triggered widespread outrage.
Rape is the fourth most common crime against women in India.
According to the 2021 annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 31,677 rape cases were registered across the country, or an average of 86 cases daily, a rise from 2020 with 28,046 cases, while in 2019, 32,033 cases were registered.
Of the total 31,677 rape cases, 28,147(nearly 89%) of the rapes were committed by persons known to the victim.
The share of victims who were minors or below 18 – the legal age of consent – stood at 10%.
India has been characterised as one of the “countries with the lowest per capita rates of rape”.
The government also classifies consensual sex committed on the false promise of marriage as rape.
The willingness to report rapes have increased in recent years, after several incidents received widespread media attention and triggered local and nationwide public protests.
This led the government to reform its penal code for crimes of rape and sexual assault.