By Aditi Malhotra
Women held placards placards during a peaceful protest in New Delhi
Two years before the fatal gang rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi in 2012
shook India and shocked the world, another young woman in India’s
capital was gang-raped in a moving vehicle, this time at gunpoint. The
verdict in the trial of the men accused of the crime is expected Monday.
On November 24, 2010, a 30-year-old woman from the northeast Indian
state of Mizoram was allegedly picked up at gunpoint on Delhi’s southern
ring road at about 1 a.m.
The woman was returning from work at a call center in Gurgaon, a satellite city in the National Capital Region, police said.
The five men abducted her in a goods carrier and assaulted her before
throwing her out of the vehicle in an industrial neighborhood in
Delhi’s west, according to the prosecutor.
They face charges including kidnapping and rape. All five have
pleaded not guilty. They were arrested soon after the incident from a
northern Indian district called Mewat in the state of Haryana.
On Monday, a fast-track court in southwest Delhi will hand down a
verdict to the five men, lawyers involved in the case said. The case was
shifted to a fast-track court in April, more than a year after New
Delhi cleared dockets to set up special courts for quick disposal of
cases relating to sexual assault following the 2012 Delhi rape.
Although they are being tried in a new court, if the defendants are
convicted, they will face punishment under old provisions of the
legislation on sexual assaults, which were in place before punishments
were toughened up in response to the 2012 gang rape.
If found guilty, the maximum punishment for the five men who all take
single names – Usman, Shamshad, Kamruddin, Shahid and Iqbal- is life
imprisonment.
Under the new law,
death is the maximum penalty in extreme cases of rape.
In September 2013, a Delhi court sentenced the four men guilty of the
December 2012 attack to death. The men are appealing that conviction.
In the case of the 30-year-old victim from Mizoram, the court has
heard testimony from 58 prosecution witnesses and 10 defense witnesses,
and has recorded hundreds of pages of evidence.
The crime threw light on to the treatment of people from India’s north east who come to the capital for work, especially women.
An estimated 15,000 people travel from the India’s north east to New
Delhi every year for better education and employment opportunities. The
seven northeastern states share closer ethnic and cultural links with
Southeast Asia and migrants from India’s northeast often end up being
the targets of casual racism because of their appearance.
According to the results of a 2011 study by New Delhi-based Northeast
Support Center and Helpline, 78% of northeasterners in New Delhi said
they faced racial discrimination. Of the crimes against northeastern
women recorded by the
helpline, molestation counted for 34%.
The Indian government has acknowledged several instances of
discrimination against people from the northeast and taken steps to
ensure their safety. In 2011, the federal ministry of home affairs, made
the use of the derogatory slur “Chinki,”
a punishable offense with a maximum punishment of five years in jail.
Then earlier this year, after the murder of a 14-year-old boy from
the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh- an alleged hate crime- the
Delhi police introduced a special helpline to address issues relating to people from the region. At the time,
campaigners also pushed for the introduction of an anti-racism law, a suggestion also put forward
by a government committee established to look into the issues of racism against people from the northeast. So far, the requests have not been granted.
Activists say people from the northeast continue to have a hard time
in the capital, particularly women. Binalakshmi Nepram, a rights
activist, said women from the northeast “become victims of a multifold
challenge of racial profiling combined with the increase in crimes
against women and lack of quick justice.”
“Women from the northeast are still stereotyped as being ‘morally loose’ and ‘easily available,’” said Ms. Nepram.