Protests engulf Indian state after rape and murder of 11-year-old girl | India
Protests continue in India’s West Bengal state after the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, the lynching of an innocent man, and the killing of one of the defendants by the police.
Anger erupted on Sunday after the body of a missing girl was found in a pond in a town just outside the state capital Kolkata.
Police said the child was raped, then stuffed into a sack and thrown into a pond while she was alive. According to the autopsy, he suffered a severe blow to his head and had bites and scratches on his body.
The bizarre attack sparked outrage from locals, who attacked a 26-year-old man they believed was responsible. When police detained the prime suspects, the murdered man was not among those named in connection with the incident and the government said he was innocent.
The incident turned into a political controversy after the recently elected state government, led by the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which is also in charge of the central government, was accused by political opponents of failing to protect women and deteriorating law and order in the state.
Family members claimed that the police initially did not take the incident seriously and they had to search for the girl themselves by checking CCTV cameras in the area. Police did not respond to the allegations.
Local stores were vandalized and police officers were targeted in the protests that followed the discovery of his body.
Tensions escalated further on Tuesday after police shot and killed prime suspect Pravash Mondal after he allegedly grabbed a police gun and tried to flee, according to officers at the scene.
The circumstances of what police called an “encounter murder” were questioned by opposition figures, who said it raised concerns about the rule of law. Similar police killings of crime suspects have been widely documented in other BJP-ruled states, but were previously unusual in West Bengal.
Women’s safety was already a contentious political issue in the state. The rape and murder of a trainee doctor at a public hospital in Calcutta in 2024 was on the agenda of the state elections held in April and was seen as one of the issues that brought down the previous government after 15 years of power.
Workers from the BJP and the opposition Trinamool Congress Party clashed with each other this week and a ban on public gatherings is now in force across the state, with paramilitary officers deployed in sensitive areas.
The state’s newly elected BJP chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, said the government was committed to preventing violent attacks on women and visited the rape victim’s family on Tuesday.
But Adhikari, known for his staunch Hindu nationalist ideology and polarizing comments against Muslims, was also accused of trying to socialize the incident, particularly the fatal mob attack on the suspect.
It was stated that the young girl who was raped was Muslim, and the attackers, who the police confessed, were Hindu. The man killed by the mob was also a Hindu.
Adhikari claimed that the attack on the Hindu man had a “social connection” and that there was a “political conspiracy” behind the violence. More than 30 people have since been arrested for lynchings and wider violence.
