India's supreme court yesterday ordered an investigation into the gang rape of a 20-year-old woman in eastern Bengal state, allegedly at the behest of her village council as "punishment" for falling in love with a Muslim boy.
The court called the case “disturbing” and asked the district judge at Birbhum, 240km west of the state capital Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) where the sexual assault took place on Monday night, to investigate and file his report within a week.
The tribal woman, who is admitted to a local hospital, told the police that she was raped the entire night on the directions of her village council for falling in love with a man from a different community and religion.
She said her lover visited her on Monday to propose marriage, but was caught by the villagers who were enraged by his motives.
The two of them were then tied to a tree while the village council conferred to decide their fate.
It ordered each of them to pay a fine of Rs25,000 (€296) and when the woman's family, too poor to pay, demurred the council ordered her gang rape, police said.
Villagers arrested
Thirteen suspects, including the head of the village council, have been arrested for the crime. But several male residents, afraid of being arrested, have fled the village leaving only women and children who were reluctant to talk about the shocking events.
“After the rape, members of the village council threatened her [the victim] with dire consequences if she lodged a police complaint,” said Kazi Mohammad Hossain, a local police official.
“The villagers surrounded her house to prevent her from leaving, but on Wednesday afternoon she managed to escape and came to the police station to file the complaint. She was limping and bleeding when she arrived at the police station.”
The victim, who belongs to the Santhal tribe, was described by neighbours as a quiet girl who worked as a poorly paid agricultural labourer and lived with her mother.
The case has brought fresh scrutiny to the role of village councils, which exercise great influence across rural India.
These councils decide social norms and, on numerous occasions, dictate the way women live their lives, dress and even who they marry. Those who flout the councils' diktats risk being ostracised and in many cases even killed in conspiracies which implicate entire villages in northern and eastern India.
Shocking 'punishments'
Shocking instances of women forced to parade naked publicly are reported regularly in the local media.
Relationships involving village women are a particularly sensitive subject. Pre-marital sex is taboo and marriages are usually arranged within the same community, caste or religious group.
The frequency of such gruesome cases, however, was illustrated by all the major newspapers in the federal capital New Delhi featuring the incident on the inside pages.
