India would have to brace up in fighting rape epidemic among its citizens to confronting sexual abuse impunity by police. Excerpts from the Washington Post report below are quite troubling.

The National Human Rights Commission said in a statement Sunday that it found least 16 women were “victims of rape, sexual and physical assault,” concluding an investigation into reports that police attacked several villages in the Bijapur district in the Chhattisgarh state during an operation against Maoist rebels in October 2015. The commission is still in the process of collecting the recorded statements of about 20 other victims of alleged sexual assault.

“Prima-facie, human rights of the victims have been grossly violated by the security personnel of the government of Chhattisgarh, for which the state government is vicariously liable,” the government commission said in its statement.

The watchdog began its own investigation after a news report was published in the Indian Express in November 2015, in which more than 40 women from five villages in the Bijapur district alleged state police sexually harassed and assaulted them, gang-raping several of them.

One of the villagers, a 14-year-old girl, was grazing her cattle when she was allegedly blindfolded and gang-raped. The news article also reported that belongings of many villagers were destroyed, stolen or scattered by the forces passing through the villages.

Police launched an investigation over the rape allegations, but no arrests have been made.

Kishore Narayan, a lawyer representing 14 victims, told AFPthe panel has backed their claims and accused the police of deliberately shielding those responsible.

“The victims gave the names of the policemen involved in the barbarity but nothing has happened,” Narayan told AFP. “They carried a sham investigation and are trying to obfuscate the case.”

 

Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression, a group that helped flag rape allegations in the villages, lauded the commission’s intervention in the cases, and claimed the findings validated the group’s “assertion that sexual violence is being used as a weapon of war” in the region, it said in a statement.

The organization said the cases filed “may be only the tip of the iceberg,” adding that reports of sexual violence by security forces continue to come in from other villages in the region where search and combing operations were carried out.

Read full report here – https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/01/09/police-in-india-accused-of-raping-at-least-16-women-human-rights-watchdog-says/?utm_term=.79ec5278d354