More chilling than Badaun Raped murdered and hanged

Always the innocent are the first victims, so it has been for ages past,so it is now.”

J.K. Rowling

Badaun is a bone-chilling name that brings to our mind the grisly images of two cousins aged 14 and 15 of Katra Sadatganj village of UP, 300 km from Lucknow, who were allegedly raped, murdered and hanged from a tree. It was more or less a revisit of a more horrendous act of ‘outraging the modesty of the two school going girls’, Rehana and Reshma, of village Kabalpunjee in the district of Karimganj in south Assam, close to Bangladesh border. As one proceeds by road to Nilambazar, 25 km from Karimganj, and diverts to the west, Kabalpunjee comes to sight after a journey of about half an hour by car.

The sleepy and nondescript village is minority dominated, belonging to marginalized people, who sustain their livelihood by agriculture and other manual work. Both the girls went missing on the night of September 3. Their family members’ late night long search found no trace of them. Next day early morning, their listless bodies tied together by a rope were seen hanging from a tree in a forested area, not very far.

Police men from Nilambazar police station, on being informed, rushed to the spot. In the presence of the family members, the bodies of Rehana and Reshma were brought down. Their bodies bore multiple injuries and bruises with blood oozing out from below their waistline. The bodies were first sent to Karimganj Civil Hospital and then to Silchar Medical College and Hospital for postmortem. Medical formalities over, they were brought back to their homes. The bath before the burial brought out more glaringly the evidence of them being physically and sexually tortured before they were done to death. In the meantime, the brother of Rehana, Abdul Basit, filed FIR with the police and the case was registered u/s 302.

Jyoti Lal Chowdhury

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