She lay on the pyre, but her parents couldn’t cry over her body. Her mortal remains were consigned to flames, but they could not perform the last rituals for her. Along with the 19-year old gang rape victim of Hathras in Uttar Pradesh, the police and the administration ‘buried’ her rights too; they did it in the middle of night as if darkness would cover-up their heartless act. What happened in the remote village in Uttar Pradesh on the night of September 29 will be remembered as the culmination of bestiality perpetrated on a Dalit girl who was gangraped allegedly by four upper caste men. Bringing back the dreadful memories of Nirbhaya case, the gang of four had kidnapped the girl who was with her mother; took her to an isolated place and gangraped her; crushed her tongue; broke her backbone; and left her paralysed. After fighting 15 days for life, she breathed her last in a Delhi hospital. 

The rapists had left her in a heap of bruised body. And the administration heaped more injustice on her after her death turning a deaf ear to the pleas of her inconsolable parents to have a last glimpse of their daughter. The U.P. police, known for their highhandedness and reckless behaviour, threw the laws to the wind and cremated her. In a recent landmark verdict, the Calcutta High Court made it mandatory that bodies of Covid 19 patients should be handed over to the relatives of the deceased for performing last rites. When even Covid victims have a right to get a dignified funeral, what the U.P. police and other wings of administration did speak volumes about their insensitivity to human beings.      

The Hathras incident reinforces that caste cauldron continues to boil in the State. Those at the helm of affairs cannot wash their hands off portraying a rosy picture. There had been many ‘Hathrases’ in the past wherein Dalit men and women had been bumped off by men who feel a sense of impunity on the false notion of caste privileges. The governments have not come down heavily on those who have orchestrated killings on the strength of their caste. Stringent National Security Act is imposed against cow slaughters and protesters, but perpetrators of caste conflagration are often allowed to go scot-free.  

Dalits and Adivasis are the worst victims of rights violations. Instead of standing with them, the governments are seen to throttle people and organizations who stand with those who have been denied their rights. We saw it when the government froze the accounts of Amnesty International in India forcing it to close down operations in the country. Amnesty is in the forefront of fighting for human rights. The government did force the Greenpeace to shut down two of its offices in India in 2019. There were raids last year in the offices of the Lawyers Collective, yet another organization which promotes human rights, rendering its function difficult. There are many human rights activists who have been taken into custody and put behind bars in the last couple of years for standing with the poor, the Adivasis and the marginalized. Hope seems to recede under a government which cracks the whip against those who speak up for the voiceless, but treats rights’ violators with kid gloves.