Etah/Firozabad/Basti:
A 35-year-old woman was found dead in her own home, her body charred in Etah early on Monday morning. The mother of three had allegedly been gang-raped by three men from a local influential family. Before they took off, they set her on fire.
"Five persons first tried to strangle my sister, and then raped her. Since my sister recognised them, they poured kerosene over her. When she was nearly dead, they ran away," says Viresh, standing outside the police station where he had come to register a police case.
However, he was told by the police that his sister had committed suicide. It took pressure from the media to get a case registered. A post-mortem is now being conducted on the victim to gauge what she was put through in her last few hours.
In Firozabad, barely 30 kilometers away, drive away, a young teen was raped allegedly in her own home. The police say the 14-year-old was seeing one of the two men who assaulted her.
Late on Sunday evening, a 38-year-old woman in Aligarh was being taken to a police station in a tempo for allegedly stealing a cell phone. She says the vehicle was stopped and a police constable and another man took turns raping her. She tried to file a police case today, but was unsuccessful.
On Saturday, in Basti district of eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP), an 18-year-old girl was allegedly raped at gun point in sugarcane fields while she was on her way home.
On the same day, a 14-year-old girl's eyes were stabbed by two men who tried to rape her in Kannauj. They were allegedly upset with her attempts to resist rape. She was abandoned bleeding in the fields and is now in a hospital in Kanpur.
Twenty hours hours before that, on Friday, in Gonda another eastern UP district, a 16-year-old was found in a sugarcane field. The police say she had been kidnapped and raped for three days before she was murdered.
And on the same day, just outside Kanpur, a 20-year-old girl was raped in a hotel for two days. The police say she went there willingly; in her complain to the police, the victim claims she was abducted from the railway station where she had been separated from her brother.
The Mayawati government's approach has been less than sensitive. "Uttar Pradesh is the most populated state of the country. We strongly believe that these are random incidents and we are dealing with it very strictly. We are being strict with the accused as well as with the police authorities who are delaying the matter. However it is important to look at the larger picture and not pass any value judgement. I am sure you can see that we are taking action in all the cases," said Prashant Trivedi, the state's Principal Secretary of Information.
The Congress has been quick to attack. "In India's largest state, the situation has completely deteriorated into anarchy where it is impossible for a woman to walk safe and free. The Chief Minister of the state has taken no action at all against any of the accused," said Jayanthi Natarajan, the party spokesperson.
As the inevitable politicking picks up, in at least seven homes, families try to piece together what's left of the young lives.