India: Police handling of girl’s rape sparks anger

Women protest near Parliament over the authorities' handling of sex crimes. Picture: AP

The case has brought a new wave of protests against how Indian authorities handle sex crimes.

Pradeep Kumar, 19, a clothing factory worker, was arrested yesterday in the eastern state of Bihar, about 600 miles from New Delhi, and was being brought to the capital, police said.

Officers said questioning of the first man arrested in the case, Manoj Kumar, led them to the second suspect. Manoj Kumar, 24, was arrested on Saturday in Bihar and flown to New Delhi. The two men are not related.

They are accused of abducting, raping and attempting to murder the five-year-old, who went missing on 15 April. She was found two days later by neighbours who heard her crying in a locked room in the same New Delhi building where she lives with her family. The girl was alone when she was found, having been left for dead by her attackers.

DK Sharma, medical chief of the hospital in New Delhi where the girl was being treated, said yesterday that she was responding well and that her condition had stabilised: “She is much better today and her wounds are healing well.”

The attack came four months after the fatal gang rape of a woman on a New Delhi bus sparked outrage across India about the treatment of women in the country.

For the third consecutive day, sporadic protests erupted in at least three places in New Delhi. Scores of supporters of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party dodged a huge police cordon and managed to reach the gates of Parliament, where they shouted slogans critical of the Delhi police’s handling of the case. Separately, about 100 women protested at another area near the Parliament building.

Most of the protests were directed against the Delhi police officers who failed to act after the girl’s parents told them she was missing.

The protesters have demanded that the Delhi police chief be removed from office and that police accused of failing to act on the parents’ complaint be dismissed.

More than 90,000 children go missing in India each year; more than 34,000 are never found.

A video showing a senior police officer slapping a young woman protester has also fuelled outrage, along with an allegation by the five-year-old’s family that the officers offered them a 2,000 rupee (£24) bribe to hush up the case, which delayed the search for the girl by several hours.

In his first news conference about the case, Delhi police chief Neeraj Kumar yesterday resisted growing demands for his resignation. He said he had suspended the policeman caught on camera slapping the protester, along with two senior officers at the police station in question.

He also offered to take the take the entire staff of the police station to the hospital for an identity parade in relation to the bribe allegations.

He also tried to defend his record, saying that rape was hard to prevent because it was commonly committed by family members.

“Is it humanly possible for a policeman to prevent a case like this, in which a neighbour lures a girl who is playing to his room and commits a crime?” he said. “Is it possible to prevent it?”

The five-year-old girl’s name has not been revealed, but the Indian media has nicknamed her “Gudiya”, or “doll”.

Several other attacks on children have been highlighted, including that of a nine-year old girl in the state of Assam, who had her throat slit after being gang-raped, TV channels said.

Brutal sex crimes are common in India, which has a population of 1.2 billion. New Delhi has the highest number of sex crimes among the country’s major cities, with a rape reported on average every 18 hours, according to police figures.

One in three rape victims in India are children, according to international children’s aid group Unicef. Child sex abuse was only outlawed last year.