2 Indian Sisters To Be Gang Raped As Punishment For Brother’s Crime

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Indian

A horrific punishment has been placed onto two sisters (23-year-old Meenakshi Kumari and her 15-year-old sister) in an Indian village.  An unelected all-male village council in India has ordered that both sisters will be raped and paraded naked with blackened faces.  Their crime?  Their brother eloped with a married woman.

Yes, that’s right – these two, innocent sisters are being punished by rape and humiliation for a “crime” they did not even commit.  The sisters, however, are fighting back.

According to The UK Independent:

Two sisters who have been told they will be repeatedly gang-raped as a “punishment” for the crimes committed by their brother have pleaded with the Supreme Court to be protected.

The pair fled their village after an all-male council “ruled” that they should be raped, have their faces blackened and then be paraded naked because the brother eloped with a married woman from a higher caste.

The council called this an eye-for-eye form of justice.

Amnesty International, who are running a petition for the girls’ protection, said: “Unelected village councils such as this are widespread in parts of India. More often than not they are made up of older men from dominant castes, who prescribe rules for social behaviour and interaction in villages.”

The Indian Caste System

Meenakshi Kumari, who is 23, is petitioning for protection from India’s highest court for herself and her 15-year-old sister and family, who are the lowest caste in India – Dalit, or Untouchables.

After their brother Ravi married and ran away with a woman of the Jat caste, senior male members in the village, which is just outside  Delhi, pledged to “avenge the dishonour” by inflicting horrific and humiliating punishment on his sisters.

Sumit Kumar, another of Meenakshi’s brothers, said the members of the Jat caste were powerful in the village. “The Jat decision is final,” he told Amnesty International.

The woman with whom Ravi eloped may also be in severe danger, according to the international human rights group. She married him willingly and is thought to be pregnant – while it is not clear whether the brother himself is in danger.

The coverage by Indian news site Zee Media outlines the love story between Ravi and the Jat woman, saying they wanted to be together when she was forcibly married to someone else in February.

Meenakshi’s father has since filed a complaint to two national bodies for harassment from the Jat woman’s family and from the police. The family home has also been ransacked, with police apparently doing little to prevent it.

The two sisters fear for their lives, and have said they cannot return to their homes in the Baghpat district. Such unelected village councils, called khap panchyat, have been labelled “kangaroo courts” by the Supreme Court they are appealing to.

Yet their decisions continue to be carried out across India, as the country remains engulfed in a wave of international controversy over the treatment of women since the gang-rape and murder of a female student in 2012 and other murders, burnings and rapes since.

Under India’s Supreme Court current rules, which were reviewed after 2012, rape within a marriage is still not recognised, and same-gender sex carries the same punishment as rape.

Revolution-News.com has been following the story closely and added to the report: The sisters are from a village in Baghpat district in India. There, on 30 July, an unelected all-male village council (khap panchayat) ordered that they be raped and paraded naked, their faces blackened, as punishment for the actions of their brother.

The sisters and their family had already fled the village in May for fear of reprisals for their brother’s actions – he eloped with a married woman from a dominant caste (Jat). Shortly after they left their house was ransacked.”

Royce Christyn

Royce Christyn

Journalist at News Punch
Documentarian, Writer, Producer, Director, Author.
Royce Christyn

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