Friday, March 29, 2024

Two minor Dalit sisters found hanging in UP, mother alleges murder

The bodies of two minor sisters, aged around 15 and 17 years, belonging to the Dalit community were found hanging from a tree in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district on Wednesday evening.

The Dalits in the region and the girls’ family accused three men of rape and murder.

The incident happened under the Nighasan police station limits of Lakhimpur Kheri district.

Local villagers and the girls’ family staged a road-block demonstration following the incident. Lucknow range inspector general (IG) of police Laxmi Singh and Lakhimpur Kheri superintendent of police (SP) Sanjiv Suman, to the protest site to assure villagers that strict action will be taken against the accused.

Suman said “the picture will be clear from the autopsy report”, which is awaited.

The mother of the girls told media that she suspected her daughters were murdered. Three youngsters of the neighbouring village on a bike abducted the two girls from near a hutment while the two sisters were cutting fodder, alleged the mother.

“I was bathing inside the hutment when three youths of the neighbouring village arrived, one in a yellow T-shirt, another in a white one and the third in a blue T-shirt,” she said.

“I saw three youths forcibly taking away my daughters on a motorcycle. I ran after the motorcycle but failed to catch them,” she added.

Bhim Army chief and Dalit icon Chandra Shekhar Aazad who shared a video of two girls on social media said the incident happened on the second anniversary of brutal caste-based rape and murder of a Dalit woman by upper-caste Hindus in UP’s Hathras.

Reacting to the incident, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav in a Twitter post in Hindi said: “The kidnapping of two Dalit sisters in Nighasan police station area, their murder and after that the father’s allegations against the police that their post-mortem was done without a ‘panchnama’ and consent is very serious. After farmers in Lakhimpur, this is a heinous repetition of the ‘Hathras ki Beti’ killing.”

Expressing her grief over the incident, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra slammed the state government and said, “The incident of murder of two sisters in Lakhimpur (UP) is heart-wrenching. The relatives say that those girls were abducted in broad daylight. Giving false advertisements in newspapers and TV every day does not improve law and order. After all, why are heinous crimes against women increasing in UP?”

Dalit activists say the incident is a grim reminder of an incident in UP’s Budaun where bodies of two Dalit sisters were found hanging from a tree in a village in 2014. Later, the allegations of gang rape and murder of two teenage girls was investigated by Central Bureau of Investigation.

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