Kolkata:
The brutal gang-rape and murder of a 20-year-old girl near Kolkata has shocked everyone. The second year student, who was returning home after college on Friday, was waylaid and dragged into a walled compound by at least six men in broad daylight. She was then raped and murdered. Her autopsy report indicated that she was so badly brutalised, her femur or thigh bone was fractured. This shocking incident comes less than 10 days after an Irish girl working with an NGO was raped in Kolkata. She is now in hospital after overdosing on sleeping pills.
In Kamdoni village, the victim's youngest brother, a Class XI student, performed her final rites on Monday. He was the one who was to escort his sister home on Friday over a lonely two and a half kilometre stretch from the bus stop on the main road to their village. But it had rained that afternoon and the brother was delayed. As a result, the sister set off for home on her own. As she passed the gates of a walled in compound, she was taken. The next time people saw her, she was dead, lying naked beside a ditch behind the high walls.
"I want revenge for my sister's death. I want the people who attacked to be hanged. This is our only request to the government," said the young boy, the rage he was feeling plain in his voice. "We don't want any of the money or the jobs that are now being offered to us. We want revenge."
Six men have been arrested but, back in their 'kuccha' one-room home, his mother echoes his sentiment with just one word repeated over and over again: "Fasi, fasi, fasi."
The girl's father, a daily wager at construction sites, was too distraught to talk but neighbours said he had worked very hard to educate his children. He was very proud of his daughter going to college. He was very proud that she had refused offers of marriage because she wanted to stand on her own feet.
In Kolkata, at the CMRI hospital, a 21-year-old Irish girl, who was in Kolkata since early May to work with an NGO, is recovering from an overdose of sleeping pills taken a week after she was raped by a man who befriended her at a night club on May 31. The alleged rapist has been arrested. She was so traumatised, she took a bunch of pain killers and sleeping pills on Friday night in her hotel room in central Kolkata. Fortunately she was conscious enough to text a friend who rushed her to hospital.
The two incidents of rape within 10 days of each other have shocked people across West Bengal.
In Kamdoni village, women are demanding police patrols and lights on the road where the girl was killed.
"We want the rapists to be hanged so that such an incident doesn't occur again. This road is not safe. Women and children are afraid to go out. Why should we live in such fear?" asked a woman who was part of a protest march in the village.
Another protestor, a Class IX girl, said, "I have to take the same road to go to my school. But I am now too scared to go that way. I haven't gone to school since the incident."
The local Trinamool MLA and minister Jyotipriyo Mallik, who offered compensation and jobs for her brothers, was heckled villagers. The MLA has promised to take the bereaved family to meet Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. But the family first wants a statement from her on the girl's death. That is yet to come.