New Delhi:
The barbarous rape of a five-year-old child, who is recovering at AIIMS in Delhi, has provoked street protests in Delhi for four days.
She is better today, said doctors, adding that she will spend another two weeks in hospital before being allowed to go home. Her parents are allowed to visit her. "Her mother is in a state of shock," said Shikha Singh, a BJP activist, who met with the child and her parents this morning.
In the General Ward, lies another five-year-old girl, who was also raped. She has no family inquiring after her.
She was found abandoned and unconscious near AIIMS last week by a hospital security guard.
The child reportedly spoke a little today to doctors, and said her mother had dropped her at AIIMS.
The police says no complaint for a missing child has been filed that matches her description, so tracking her family is proving to be near-impossible.
Since last week, a relentless slew of sexual attacks on young girls have been reported from Delhi and other parts of India. A four-year-old is in a coma in a Nagpur hospital. She was flown there on an air ambulance on Saturday evening from Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, where she was kidnapped and raped in her village.
Recently, the government introduced tough new laws to punish sexual crimes against women, the result of the national outrage that followed the fatal gang-rape of a young woman on a moving bus in Delhi in December.
But the new savage attacks against children prove what many activists and experts have been highlighting all along - that implementation of the laws, and a societal correction in attitudes towards girls and women are what India needs to correct urgently.