By IANS,
New Delhi : Days after a girl was raped and her father committed suicide, Dalit residents of Haryana’s Dabra village are still afraid of letting their daughters go out.
A fact-finding team of the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) and its allied organization, the All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch (AIDMAM) that visited the village Oct 1 said the locals were afraid of letting their daughters go even to school in the village.
“A police post is there in the Dalit part of the village, and a police van outside the victim’s house. Yet, when we talked to them, the villagers said they were afraid of letting their daughters go out,” said Asha Kowtal, General Secretary, AIDMAM.
“But they had to let them go, mainly because they had exams,” she added.
A 16-year-old girl was raped in this village of Hisar district of Haryana on Sep 9. When she eventually told her family about the incident, her father committed suicide Sep 18, apprehending public humiliation.
“Today, we need civil society to stand up and express the same degree of anger and shame we saw six years ago during the nation-wide campaign to seek justice for Jessica Lal,” Kowtal said.
“The growing incidence of violence on Dalit women and girls is irrefutable proof of the colossal failure of the state to protect them,” she added.
Sirivella Prasad, general secretary of National Dalit Movement for Justice pointed out that Haryana had no commission for Scheduled Castes.
“Not only are there crimes against the Dalits, mostly it is not even registered. There is no commission for SCs in the state, there is supposed to be a committee under the district collector to monitor districts prone to atrocities against Dalits, but nothing is being done,” he said.
Kowtal added that the state also did not have a state women’s commission.