Hang Your Head In Shame

A 12-year-old girl is gangraped and murdered in Assam by nine juveniles. What’s fuelling the spurt in crime against women in the state?

- Sadiq Naqvi

ON February 28, a group of nine teenagers—all boys and class­mates—of a nondescript village in Assam decided to celebrate the end of their class 10 board exams. For their picnic, they decided on a forested area off their village in Biswanath district, about 300 km from Guwahati. It was nearing sunset when one of the boys, all of them allegedly drunk by then, decided to call his “girlfriend” to the party. They lured her to a denser part of the forest where they took turns to allegedly rape her, and then strangulated her to death before stringing up the body from a tree to make it look like a suicide. All of them then went home as usual, had dinner with their families and went to bed.

Except for perfunctory condemna­tions by women’s groups and some soc­ial organisations, the gangrape­murder did not see much outrage in Assam, a state which has seen a staggering rise in crimes across women over the past few years. Even the involvement of juveniles without any history of delin­quency and the cool calculated manner in which they acted has failed to set alarm bells ringing in the state. For a state which hits the streets more than any other part of the country, the most vocal organisations—including the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU)—app­ ear to have sidestepped the issue.