Amid nationwide outage against the alleged gang rape and murder of a 20-year-old woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras, a Dalit teenage girl in poll-bound Bihar’s Gaya district died by suicide on Friday after allegedly being gang raped by four men, the police said.
According to the police, the girl’s parents have filed a case of gang rape naming three of the four accused as Rahul Kumar, Chintu Kumar and Chandan Kumar. The fourth accused remains unidentified, the police said.
According to sources, the body’s autopsy was done at Gaya Medical College and the results are awaited.
The case comes close on heels of a Dalit woman’s alleged gang rape and murder by four men from a so-called “upper caste” community in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras.
The Hathras victim died on Tuesday at a hospital in Delhi. She had suffered multiple fractures, paralysis and severe spinal injury when she was assaulted by four men from her village on September 14. The police said there was a gash in her tongue because she had bitten it when the men were trying to strangle her.
The Uttar Pradesh Police’s handling of the case, including delay in filing a case of rape and dead-of-night cremation without the family’s consent or presence, has snowballed into a political issue that is likely to cast its shadow on the three-phase Bihar Assembly elections starting October 28.
Opposition parties, including Congress and RJD, are likely to corner Bihar’s ruling coalition led by Nitish Kumar Yadav over women’s safety, atrocities against Dalits, the three controversial farm bills okayed by the President amid continued opposition by farmers still on protest, its handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the migrant crisis.
