Rohtak gang rape: India is horrified, Khattar government apathetic

Precisely three months after Aarti and Pooja, the brave Sonipat sisters who thrashed three jat youngsters for sexually tormenting them, not too far away, nine men gang raped, brutally tortured and eventually squelched out the very life from the defenceless body of a 28-year-old. Emotionally challenged, the young woman, a Nepali, was simply not equipped to distinguish between kindly souls and the nine monsters that ganged up on her on February 1.

There is a disturbing tentativeness about Haryana’s new Bharatiya Janata Party government headed by chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, who was credited with some very controversial observations on feminine sartorial preferences even before he took office in early November 2014.

Back in Thana Khurd, the Sonipat village where Pooja and Aarti live with their parents, the girls are still awaiting the verdict of the police inquisition instituted by chief minister Khattar after families of the three young men accused of harassing them protested their sons’ innocence. This after the CM had gone all out and proclaimed the sisters as "heroes" promising accolades for bravery on Republic Day 2015.

But post-January 26, 2015, the Khattar government is evidently in no particular hurry. State finance minister Captain Abhimanyu, currently on a short sabbatical to complete a course at the Harvard Business School, summarily told reporters in Chandigarh less than two weeks back that they would “be informed about the findings of the inquisition in due course”.

Really? Does it take the Haryana Police more than two whole months to determine whether Pooja and Aarti are habitual "boy bashers" or the brave young girls that Khattar initially hailed them as?

Perhaps taking a cue from the Khattar government’s lack of interest in taking a call on the Sonipat sisters, the Haryana Police in Rohtak reportedly shooed away the Nepali victim’s family members when they tried to lodge a missing person’s report on February 1.

Eight men have since been arrested and a ninth, said to be a Nepali migrant worker who lured the victim to her horrible fate, is stated to have committed suicide in Delhi.

The victim, according to the post-mortem examination conducted at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Science at Rohtak, was gang raped, then butchered. She was recovered without her heart, lungs and her vagina and anus stuffed full of stones, condoms. Her head (skull) had been bashed in, possibly using large stones.

True, the Rohtak Police deftly cracked the case employing mobile phone positioning data as well as call records to link the perpetrators to the crime.

But thanks to the terrible apathy that seems to filter all the way down from the government in Chandigarh, they waited four whole days – acknowledging the crime only after the body was recovered on February 4 and launching investigating only after national TV, during its breather between the exit polls and counting day for the Delhi polls, became interested.