Two Dalit Minor Girls Raped, Killed in Haryana; Cases of Sexual Violence on Rise in the State.

In the second week of January, three incidents of sexual violence have been reported from different regions in Haryana. In two separate incidents, two Dalit minor girls were gang-raped and killed and in another incident, a 22-year-old woman was kidnapped, gangraped in a moving car. As many as 1189 number of rape cases are officially registered in the year 2016 in Haryana, according to NCRB data.

The body of a 15-year-old Dalit girl who went missing on 9 January from Haryana’s Kurukshetra city was found near a water channel in Jind district in the state. An autopsy conducted on the deceased revealed that the minor girl was gangraped and her body brutalized before her death. While the Haryana Police authorities have constituted two SIP probes to look into this case, the girl’s father, a tailor, who had complained about his missing daughter on January 10 had reportedly alleged that the Police did not take the case seriously which resulted in the death of his daughter.

Dr. SK Dhattarwal, who examined the deceased in Rohtak’s Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences on Sunday told that the girl must have been raped by more than two persons and had 19 injuries on her body. Her internal organs found ruptured, he told the Indian Express that the assaulters might have tried to thrust some object into her private parts. In last December, a five-year-old girl was abducted, raped and killed who was also brutalized in the similar manner in Haryana’s Hisar. Her family lived in a make-shift tent who made living by earning from rag-picking.

In another horrifying incident, an 11-year-old Dalit girl was gang-raped and killed by two of her neighbors in Panipat district’s Urlana village on Sunday. It has been reported that the police have arrested two accused persons - Pradeep, 28, and Sagar, 24, who allegedly killed the girl first and raped her corpse.

On January 13, a 22-year-old woman was kidnapped and gangraped by three men in Faridabad. According to the victim’s complaint, she was kidnapped near Rajiv-Chowk in Faridabad and raped for three hours in a moving SUV by three men and later abandoned near a petrol bunk in Sikri.

Haryana was ranked 6th among all states in the category of crime against women in 2016, according to NCRB data. A total number of 9839 crime against women cases were officially registered in the state, with a 9 percent increase in crime rate in the category as compared to 2014.

Haryana is also known for a number of Honour killings led by Khap Panchayats. Despite a Supreme Court’s order which called ‘Khap Panchayats’ as illegal, the kangaroo courts are still being held in most of the villages across Haryana. In the Khap Panchayats, the heads pass ‘dikats’ in cases of inter-caste or inter-clan marriages amounting to honour killings of the innocent youth. Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar once claimed that the Khap Panchayats as “useful instruments” of society which suggest the state governments’ attitude in dealing with such vigilante groups.

Even though the numerous reports suggests the enduring violence on women in the state, civil rights activists and commentators have criticized the state government for not tackling upon such state of affairs.