Manesar gangrape, Rohtak murder: India is as unsafe for women as it was in December 2012

New Delhi: Nearly five years after the 2012 Delhi gangrape incident shook the nation’s conscience, women continue to be vulnerable on the streets, if the recent string of brutal sexual assaults on them are to go by.

The shocking 16 December, 2012 case had triggered a massive public outcry and it culminated in awarding of death sentence to four of the accused on 5 May this year, but similar incidents continue to haunt women, from neighbourhood’s dark alleys to desolate highways, as they go about their daily lives.

On 29 May, a 23-year-old woman was allegedly gang raped by three men in the industrial area of Manesar, a short distance away from the bustling ‘millennium town’ of Gurgaon, after they fatally flung her nine-month-old baby out of a moving vehicle.

The trio had given her a lift and taken her to a secluded spot in Manesar, where they took turns to rape her on the ground, Gurgaon Police said.

Yogendra, one of the two accused held on Wednesday, told police they had been drinking beer and were inebriated when they came upon the young woman — of the same age as the physiotherapy student, who was picked up on the fateful night of 16 December, 2012, from a bus stop in Delhi.

But, this horrific episode has been preceded by several bone-chilling incidents related to sexual assaults on women.

On 11 May, the decomposed and mutilated body of a woman, who had gone missing from Sonepat on 9 May and was gang raped and brutally murdered, was found near the Industrial Model Township in Urban Estate, Rohtak. Stray dogs had bitten off the face and lower portion of her body.

The autopsy of the victim had shown that the bones of the woman’s skull were shattered into pieces and “some sharp-edged objects may have been inserted in her private parts”, again an eerie reminder of the infamous 2012 Delhi gangrape case.

And, on 25 May, it was a highway to hell for four women who were allegedly raped by a group of five criminals at gunpoint in a field off the Yamuna Expressway and one of the four men travelling with them was shot dead when he objected to the assault.

The shocking incident had taken place at night when eight persons of a family were travelling to Bulandshahr to meet a relative at a hospital.

A 27-year-old woman was allegedly gang raped in front of her husband, who was tied to a tree and gagged, in Sahaswan area of Uttar Pradesh’s Badaun district.

The incident took place on 22 May evening when the woman was returning home from a health clinic, along with her husband.

But it is not just women who face terror from preying men. Young girls and even children continue to be subjected to sexual assaults.

A 7-year-old girl was allegedly gangraped in a remote village of Allahabad on 25 May.

The ghastly incident took place in Ghurpur police station area of the district’s trans-Yamuna region, about 40 km from the city in the morning.

“The girl was picked up from her house in Amreha Budawan village while she was asleep besides her mother. She was brought back home by villagers who found her lying in a pool of blood in the nearby fields, where the assailants appear to have dumped her after the sexual assault,” according to Sandeep Tiwari, Public Relations Officer of the Senior Superintendent of Police of Allahabad.

On 20 May, a minor girl was allegedly raped by her 70-year-old next-door neighbour at Khanna area, about 45 km from Ludhiana.

Cases of sexual assault and rape of minor girls have also been reported in the last month from Haryana’s Yamunanagar and Jewar area of Greater Noida, Sikar district of Rajasthan, among other places.

A 30-year-old woman was shot at when she had resisted an alleged molestation and rape attempt by two youths in Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli district on 24 May.