On Sept. 29, a 19 year-old woman died of injuries after she was allegedly gang raped by a group of men in a field in Hathras district, in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. She was a Dalit, member of a community at the bottom of India’s rigid caste hierarchy, while the four alleged perpetrators, who have been arrested and charged with murder and rape, are members of a dominant upper caste. The woman had spent two weeks fighting for her life in a Delhi hospital after the alleged gang rape on Sept.14, which left her with severe damage to her spinal cord. (The woman has not been named in the Indian press due to a law that prohibits identifying the victims of sexual violence.) The night of her death, police returned to the family’s village with her body. But instead of handing her over to her mourning family, the family has said the police insisted she be cremated there and then. When the family refused, saying they wanted time to say goodbye, police locked them in th...
