As three men who raped his minor daughter in 2016 are convicted and sentenced by a Rajasthan court, a father finds little solace. The case reflects how Dalits who challenge power structures are administratively persecuted and makes clear the significance of gender in caste crimes. The story of a young, ambitious Dalit girl whose fate caused an entire village to pull their daughters from school.

New Delhi: On 29 March 2016, a little over two months after the suicide of Rohith Vemula stirred national debate on institutional caste oppression, a 17-year-old Dalit student died under suspicious circumstances in Nokha, Rajasthan, her body found in a water tank at a residential teacher’s training institute.

While the training institute claimed that the victim’s death was suicide by drowning, her father alleged that she had been raped and murdered.

As per the father’s police complaint, on the evening of 28 March, at around 8 pm, his daughter called and told him she had been raped by her physical education instructor, Vijendra Singh, when she had gone to clean his room after being told to by her hostel-warden, Pragya Shukla. Naming Singh, Pragya Shukla and college principal Prateek Shukla in his complaint, the father alleged that his daughter had been murdered in an attempt to cover up the rape.

The institute’s administration insisted that the girl died by suicide after she was “caught” in a compromising position with her physical education instructor. They even claimed that they received a written apology from both the victim and Singh with a statement that the physical interaction was with “mutual consent”.

However, the institute’s attempt to abdicate liability by alleging consensual sex was bound to fail. Statutory rape laws in India presume coercion, the rationale being that a minor is incapable of giving consent to the act.


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