State officials cover up rape cases in UP, says Piyush Srivastava

The mob fury over the gang rape of a Dalit woman in the Hathras district shows how charged the situation has become.

It's no secret that under the stewardship of Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, law and order has become a nightmare in Uttar Pradesh. What's worse is that top officers and politicians in the state are believed to be increasingly interfering in many of these cases, often asking police officers to undermine the seriousness of a crime.

In a horrific incident, a married Dalit woman in Sikandararau area of Hathras district was abducted from her marital home and allegedly gang-raped by seven youths. Sources said she recognised three of her captors, and they, fearing she would reveal their identity, set her on fire. Despite mob fury over her killing, sources claim the case was stalled because of the intervention of an IAS officer. The officer has allegedly requested the police to cast aspersions on the woman's character and claim she had illegitimate relations with the accused. This is just one of the incidents.

In May this year, two minor Dalit girls were gangraped and hanged from a mango tree in Badaun. Sources claimed that the CBI probe revealed that the older of the two girls was in a relationship with the main accused, Pappu Yadav, and had gone to meet him along with her sister on the day of the incident. The family refuted these claims and said that evidence like broken bangles and beer bottles, had been planted by the police to frame the family.

Such cases should have generated a public debate on the safety of women in Uttar Pradesh. But instead, both the Yadavs - Akhilesh and Mulayam - have been strangely silent on the issue, giving rise to talk that the government machinery is involved in the cover-ups and is trying their best to shift the blame on to the girl and the family. Nothing can illustrate this better than the latest incident. A laboratory technician at Lucknow's Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGIMS) was found killed in Mohanlalganj on July 17. The police claimed that she was on her way to a farmhouse with a stranger at 11pm. But that is not the only thing. Investigating agencies and all the related wings have proved they too are susceptible. Take the above mentioned case. A team of six doctors and forensic experts, conducting the autopsy, apparently did not see the woman had only one kidney, as they wrote both her kidneys were intact. They also didn't bother to investigate her age and declared her to be 25 years old, which she was not. She was 36 years old. Clearly, there is much cause for concern here.

The same is true of the Badaun case. The CBI, investigating the case, was suspicious of the manner in which the autopsy was conducted. For instance, it came to light that one of the doctors in the team was doing it for the first time in her career. Secondly, all three doctors apparently did not know that a post-mortem examination is never done after sunset, yet they prepared a report and allegedly changed the incident of gang-rape into "suspected rape". Insiders claim the lack of knowledge was because it was done by the caretakers of the mortuary, and the doctors later signed it.

Naturally suspicious, the CBI wanted an exhumation and a second autopsy. But what they did not know, though locals did, that the graves of the two girls would be submerged in flood on July 19 or 20 because of the water released from Hardwar. This duly happened, ensuring the case remains stalemated and allows the guilty to escape. If this is the way state machinery handles a case of crime against women, there is little doubt that crimes against women will continue, with the guilty fearing no threat of punishment.

Dormant dacoits bounce back to form

Dacoits who were dormant have sprung to life under the new regime. Take the case of the Balkhariya gang, located in the rugged terrain of Bundelkhand. The gang, led by Sudesh Kumar Patel was fairly dormant while Mayawati was chief minister, has sprung back to action under the SP regime. Patel's audacity has risen so high that he asked villages to fetch 35 buckets of water for his gang every day. The villagers comply, as gang members even kill policemen with no fear of consequences.

But the police should apply logic to find out how many gang members there are. For instance, those familiar with the area claim the gang has committed a blunder by saying it needed only 35 buckets of water a day. Why? Villagers of Nibi and Sangrampur in Banda say each adult of the area uses minimum four buckets of water in 24 hours. By this calculation, there should be only nine dacoits in Patel's gang.

But more outlaws mean more funds for the police to arrest or kill them. According to police files there are at least 200 dacoits in different gangs of the region. On an average, Rs 50 crore is spent in a year in combing and other operations to eliminate them. So, a reduction in the number of dacoits reduces police funds.

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Director General of Police A.L. Bannerjee was a busy man last week. He rushed to a mall after a call from a woman who was cat-fighting with another woman. Bannerjee ordered the police to arrest the other woman and keep her in the women's cell for the night. The arrested is the wife of a contractor who had allegedly taken eight lakh rupees from the husband of the complainant for the construction of a house, but couldn't meet the deadline. The question remains as to why the DGP suddenly turned proactive and intervened in a seemingly minor matter? Is there something more to the case?

Akhilesh's Rae Bareli problem

Chief minister Akhilesh Yadav had tried every possible trick in 2010-11 to halt the plan of Congress president Sonia Gandhi to bring AIIMS hospital to Rae Bareli, her Parliamentary constituency. He had written to the then Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad that UP needed an AIIMS in Bundelkhand, eastern and western Uttar Pradesh before Rae Bareli.

But medical facilities are the need of the hour, a fact Akhilesh does not seem to realise. Sadly, he has never talked about the 600 Auxiliary Nursing and Midwifery (ANM) centres in UP including 322 in the Gonda district where child deliveries are often done in darkness. Those who are able to buy kerosene from the market request nurses to buy them to do so. But there is no electricity connection in those ANM centres and the government has no plan so far to bring it there. There are also about 250 centres in the state including 40 in Gonda where there is no ANM. The health department officers believe in keeping records instead of working on the ground. Ask them about the problem and they will show you the documents which prove they are meeting the specification of an ANM centre for a population of 10,000.

But undeterred Akhilesh has a standard answer for every question about: 'Aap ne sangyan me dala hai, dikhwa liya jaega.' (You have brought it to my knowledge. We will look into it.) And the rest then is consigned to history.