“Ab laut ke toh dobara nahi ayegi…hum apne ghar se hi bidai karna chahte hai!”
She will not return now…we wanted to bid her farewell from our home.
These words, spoken by the inconsolable mother of the woman gang-raped in Hathras in Uttar Pradesh, encapsulate why the nationwide outrage over the sexual assault intensified on Wednesday.
The 19-year-old Dalit woman, who was raped and tortured by four upper-caste men on the night of September 14, died in Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital on Tuesday morning. At 2.25 am on Wednesday, the state police forcibly cremated her body at a funeral ground in her village, while her family was allegedly barricaded within their home.
The family claimed that they wanted to cremate the woman’s body in the morning, but the police did not allow them to take her home to perform the customary rituals.
The four men accused of raping the woman…