WUNRN
“You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of
its women.”
– Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru
Aljazeera Article on India Gang Rape
of Woman Medical Student on Bus & VIDEO of Violent Protests in Delhi.
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INDIA - OUTRAGE OVER DELHI GANG RAPE
SWELLS
AFP | 20th December, 2012
Indian students and activists shout
slogans as they carry torches at India Gate during a protest following the
gang-rape of a student in
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh joined
his ruling Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi in condemning Sunday night’s
“heinous” assault by six drunken man who were joyriding on a bus when they
picked up the woman and a male companion.
After taking turns to rape the woman, the
attackers then threw the pair off the vehicle.
Four people, including the bus driver, have
so far been arrested, while a hunt is ongoing for two other suspects.
As the government tried to address the
anger with series of steps, protests spread to other major cities including
Mumbai, Kolkata and Ahmedabad.
Police used water cannon on one group of
demonstrators as they tried to tear down steel barricades outside the official
residence of
Before the violence broke out, protesters
carrying banners chanted: “We want equal rights for women.”
“Women don’t feel safe in the city, this is
appalling,” said 18-year-old student protester Jayesha Koushik.
“The blame is always put on the women. ‘She
was not wearing the right dress, she was out at the wrong time, she must have
provoked it’. How can you blame the women for rape?”
“Rapes are happening to teach women a
lesson,” said Kavita Krishnan of the All India Progressive Women’s Association
who was among the protesters.
Even Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan
weighed in by calling on his Facebook page for “every Indian (to) become a
vigilante, a soldier, a commander” to “fight such heinous crimes with strength
and conviction”.
National crime records show that 228,650 of
the total 256,329 violent crimes recorded last year were aimed against women.
Rape cases in
“It’s a heinous crime. It is very
upsetting,” Prime Minister Singh told a parliamentary delegation which met him
to discuss the latest attack.
Singh said he had asked Home Minister
Sushilkumar Shinde to “ensure that (the) culprits are brought to justice and
such cases do not recur”, according to the Press Trust of India.
Shinde announced in parliament that there
would be a crackdown on buses having tinted glass and heavy curtains — measures
that should already be in force.
Congress’s Gandhi who is
“Such violence and criminality needs not
only to be condemned, it calls for a concerted effort to fight it,” Gandhi said
in a letter to Dikshit.
Hospital doctors have been shocked by the
extent of the rape victims’ injuries. “They cannot be described in words”, a
surgeon who did not want to be named told AFP.
The rape took place over a period of more
than 40 minutes on Sunday in a bus which had stopped to pick up the two victims
who had spent the evening at a cinema.
“They began molesting the girl and her
companion bravely fought back trying to save her but these men attacked him
with an iron rod,” police commissioner Neeraj Kumar said on Tuesday.
“The victim was dragged to the rear of the
bus and brutally beaten and raped.”
Three of the suspects appeared before a
city magistrate on Wednesday where a police request for a custody extension was
granted.
Kumar demanded the death penalty for people
convicted of rape, a crime that currently carries a maximum punishment of 10
years in prison.