On 14th September 2020, four upper caste men gang-raped a Dalit woman in Hathras, Yogi’s Uttar Pradesh. About two and half years later, three out of four of the (Ramu, Luv Kush, and Ravi) rape accused have been acquitted. Even the main accused has not been charged with rape, instead, he has been charged with culpable homicide and SC/ST atrocities act. The BJP government time and again prides itself by asserting the decrease in crime rate in Uttar Pradesh during Yogi’s tenure, and the mystery has been solved. If the Yogi government keeps acquitting criminals, rapists, casteists, murderers, there would be no criminal record left to account for.
The Hathras gang rape case shook the country, not only because of the gruesome act, but also because of the police and administration’s impetuous and insensitive approach towards the case. The victim and her family received absolutely no support from the government, instead, the entire state machinery was deployed to hush up the case. The Police and administration worked hand in gloves to intimidate the family members of the woman by denying them right to legal remedy, justice, and even a proper funeral.
The ways in which Yogi government and UP Police protected the Rajput men (same caste as the CM) of Hathras who raped a 19 year old Dalit woman are:
1. The Police in Hathras burnt her funeral pyre in the middle of the night against the consent of her family. The Dalit woman was dehumanised in life and even in death.
2. The victim had clearly given a statement to the police, whilst still hospitalised due to her injuries, stating that the four Rajput men had raped and assaulted her, the assault that ultimately lead to her death on 29th September 2020.
3. On October 1, the UP ADG (law and order) Prashant Kumar made claims that the victim was not raped based on a forensic lab report that was collected eight days after the offence took place, although the standard procedure is to get these samples as soon as possible.
4. Soon after the incident, “Rashtriya Savarna Parishad’ came out in support of the rapists, and several other organisations and politicians associated with the BJP-RSS nexus, like the Bajrang Dal and Karni Sena, joined in their support.
5. A Mumbai-based private PR firm circulated a clarification note on behalf of the Yogi government. This firm tried to push the agenda that the entire incident is not actually based on the rape of a Dalit woman but is actually a ‘conspiracy to push the state into caste turmoil’.
6. On the pretext of preventing ‘caste turmoil’, the Yogi administration attempted to prevent leaders from opposition parties from meeting the family of the victim. Journalist Siddique Kappan was arrested for two years on his way to cover the news under UAPA.
The Hathras incident remains a ghastly reminder of the feudal caste-structures in our country. It is true that our constitution has criminalised discrimination on grounds of caste, religion, and gender, but the truth is that all such principles are notoriously subverted by fascist forces like the RSS and BJP. They willfully want to keep India a caste society, where access to all tangible and intangible resources remains concentrated in the hands of those born into upper caste families.
The Dalit girl from Hathras was not just a victim of caste but also of the state government’s divisive politics. The ruling government has consistently used the structures of gender and caste-based violence as a political tool to establish its power. From the Laxmanpur Bathe massacre of 1997, where Ranvir Sena raped and massacred around 58 people from the Dalit community to the Hathras gang rape, the powers of the RSS and its tentacles have turned the Dalit woman’s body as a site of violence.
And as if the act of violence in itself is not enough, what came after the incident is even more harrowing. For the victim’s family, the first few days after the incident were a mix of grieving for their daughter as well as dealing with the extreme backlash, from their own villagers to the national media, all calling them liars. Today, more than two years after the incident, the three young girls in the family have not gone to school. The victim’s sister-in-law cannot step outside the house without security because the Upper Caste goons still threaten them, and the house is surrounded by CRPF personnel and barbed wire. The members of the family have still not received the government jobs they were promised. Kamal KP, a former PFI member, was arrested under UAPA in the Hathras case “for disturbing communal harmony after the death of a Dalit girl” on the same day the Thakur men were acquitted. Now, the upper caste men are roaming free in the streets of Hathras, as if September 14, 2020, never happened, while those who protested are being jailed.
Four Dalit women are reportedly raped every day in India, and NCRB data shows that the conviction rate for these cases is much lower than the rest. This is a result of the institutional and structural bias built around caste solidarities between the criminal justice system, the police, and the judiciary. The Hathras incident is not just a reflection of the absence of law and order in UP; it is an outcome of the structure that has been carefully moulded into perfection by the current regime, a structure that allows and even rewards atrocities against the people living in the margins of society. Only strong voices of movemental resistance can defeat these structural violence and the political forces that cultivate them.
