Raped, murdered, burnt to ash: story of a Dalit girl, 9, in modern India
- India abolished discrimination on the basis of caste in 1948, yet every day 10 Dalit, or untouchable, women and children are raped – and the problem is getting worse
- In the case of Asha, her body was forcibly cremated in an apparent move to hide the evidence. Campaigners allege that in many cases, even the police prefer not to know
Asha, 9, left her tiny, second-floor illegally constructed flat in Old Delhi’s Nangal Village on August 1 to find drinking water. She never returned.
Her mother found Asha’s bruised corpse in the grounds of a crematorium. “Her eyes were open but no light in them,” the grieving mother recounted.
She said a priest appeared and “told me Asha had been electrocuted while taking water from the crematorium’s electric water cooler. But I didn’t believe him. If she was shocked then why were there so many bruises on her body?”
The priest told Asha’s mother to “keep quiet and let it go”, that “what has happened has happened”. Then she saw that the priest and three other men had prepared a funeral pyre.
Caste crime
Asha’s mother suspects – as do Delhi police – not only that her young daughter was raped and murdered by the men, but that, like an increasing number of female victims of violent crime in India, she was targeted for her caste.
Coming from a family of ragpickers, Asha – who had often taken leftovers from the crematorium and run errands for its priest in the past – was considered an “untouchable” or Dalit (a word meaning oppressed or trampled on).