“Nobody is here, they all left me here alone,” a 10-year-old girl said, craning out her neck from a small hut in the Ravi Das camp, a slum cluster in south Delhi where four of the gangrape accused lived.
The girl is the sister of one of the accused, Pawan Gupta. She was nervous. Her parents fled home leaving her alone at home after they heard about the rape victim’s demise. We saw a similar thing at another accused Vinay’s house too in the same colony. Vinay’s eight-year-old brother was left alone at home after his parents fled home to save themselves from the public ire.
When we visited the colony on Saturday, an old man from the area also showed us the locked house where the main accused Ram Singh (33) and his younger brother and the co-accused Mukesh Singh (31) lived. “These men had already kicked out their parents from the house a few months ago. They never had any contact with other residents here,” he said.
Grief and anger was hovered over the Ravi Das camp. “Hang the culprits,” the residents said, adding that “We are frightened of them.” Women in the colony said that they had not eaten anything the whole day to mark their condolence to the girl.
“These men have shamed us. We still can’t believe that men from our colony could do such inhuman things,” said one of the residents. Accused Pawan’s family was forced to shut down their fruit stall in the nearby market at RK Puram Sector-1 a day after the gangrape incident.
“Women across the country are frightened after the incident. But I am the one who is the most frightened and scared as I live in the same place where the culprits live,” said a 17-year-old girl from the colony, who did not want to be named. “We wanted to go for the protest, but we were scared as to how would we be received,” said another woman from the colony.