While three of the five youth accused of gangraping a Patna schoolgirl and making a porn CD of the incident were arrested and are being produced in a court, another rape accused in Bihar had no such democratic luck as he was beaten to death under the Maoists’ orders.
The alleged inaction of the police in Bihar soon after receiving complaints of atrocious crimes against women has drawn flak and is being blamed for such utter unpredictability of crime and punishment in the state.
In both the cases, the police had reportedly refused to lodge an FIR. The Patna police had not bothered to take any action even after videoclips of the alleged gangrape were aired on a local TV news channel. After the 17-year-old schoolgirl’s FIR was finally lodged over a month after the crime in an apartment at a posh area, the Patna police arrested three accused minors at places as disparate as Shimla in Himachal Pradesh, Jalandhar in Punjab and Chhapra in Bihar on Thursday.
The court of chief judicial magistrate in Patna, having taken suo moto cognisance of the case, had issued non-bailable warrants against the four a day before.
Video CDs of the Class 11 student’s alleged gangrape, said to have occurred on June 14, were reportedly in wide circulation through MMS and the Internet for a fortnight. The video is currently under forensic examination.
One of the two absconding accused is said to be a Bihar ruling party politician’s son. The five accused include the victim’s boyfriend and his friends.
But Dhalo Yadav, a resident of Thadi village in Bihar’s southern Jamui district, could not survive even 10 days after he was accused of raping a woman in the village.
With the police reportedly refusing to lodge an FIR and the hapless woman keeping quiet, the Maoists learnt of the crime and put him on trial at a kangaroo court lasting about two hours. As punishment, they reportedly beat Yadav, 40, to death and left his brother badly wounded. Yadav’s body was found on Thursday.