Four people have been jailed after a woman was gang raped by three men while she was unconscious in 2017. A 40-year-old woman who abetted the crime had forced the victim to consume alcohol, causing her to become unconscious. Three men then gang raped the woman who worked in Sultanabad mandal, central India, on March 10, 2017.
Sentences handed down in Karimnagar
All four people involved were sentenced to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment on Friday in Karimnagar and ordered to pay a fine of ₹11,000 (£86). Gundaboina Shankar, 45, Nyatari Swamy, 40, both from Peddapalli district, and Sanjay Kumar Yadav, 30, from Bihar, were convicted of gang rape. The woman from Sultanabad, who fed her alcohol, was found guilty of abetting the crime, reports Indian news organisation The Hindu.
The case was tried at a special court for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, a special law enacted in India to prevent caste-based atrocities, crimes, and discrimination. Special courts were established to ensure faster trials for such cases.
Protests and parallels to Nirbhaya
Protests erupted last week in Delhi after successive rape cases in recent weeks, including the alleged gang-rape of a 17-year-old in a public park by three men who posed as police officers.
Fourteen years have passed since Delhi’s Nirbhaya rape case in 2012, when a woman was gang-raped on a bus and died from her injuries. Legislation was changed to inflict harsher punishment on rapists following the harrowing attack, but in 2018, one woman reported a rape every 15 minutes on average in India, according to Government data. The numbers are believed to be far higher due to chronic under-reporting.
Women at the marches last week said nothing has changed. Vaishnavi Dhruw, 21, a history student at Delhi University, told The Guardian: “I don’t know a single woman who lives in this city and feels safe,” she said.
The Supreme Court said the five successive rape cases "starkly underlined a systematic failure" and it could not help but "draw painful parallels to the Nirbhaya incident of 2012".
