A woman in northern India has been
stripped naked and paraded on a donkey on the orders of village elders after
being accused of killing her nephew.
The village council in Rajsamand district in Rajasthan state also ordered the
45-year-old woman's face to be blackened.
Her nephew's family say she killed him. Police have arrested 39 people.
Orders given by village councils - panchayats - carry no legal weight but are
widely respected in rural areas.
Rajasthan's principal secretary for rural development, Shreemat Pandey, told
the BBC it was "completely illegal" for the panchayat to hand down such a
punishment. Continue..
On 2 November, a
45-year-old man, Vardi Singh, killed himself in Thurawad village.
Three days after his funeral was held, his wife and some other relatives went
to the police alleging that Mr Singh had been killed by his aunt.
On Saturday night the family approached the village council which agreed that
the aunt was guilty of murder.
On the council's order, the woman's head was shaved and her face was
blackened with coal dust, she was stripped naked and taken around the village on
a donkey.
"It's a shameful incident that a woman was treated so badly on orders from
the village council," Ms Dhankhad said.
"Initially, she was even afraid to talk about what had happened to her but
after the police and officials from the social welfare department arrived, she
was able to feel a little safe and narrate her ordeal."
Correspondents say women are routinely stripped and paraded naked in rural
India in order to punish and humiliate them.
In October, a woman in the eastern state of Jharkhand was stripped
and paraded naked before several family members by her in-laws who wanted a
big dowry from her.
In July, a 60-year-old woman was
beaten, stripped and tied to an electricity pole in a village in the eastern
state of Orissa after local people accused her of being a witch.
In January 2012, some upper-caste men in Maharashtra state beat, stripped and
paraded naked a low-caste Dalit woman because her son had eloped with an
upper-caste girl.
Most of these incidents of public shaming take place in remote villages and
the victims, almost always from economically and socially disadvantaged
sections, have no alternative but to continue to live in the communities where
they were humiliated.
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