SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 8, 2013 – The murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey, the New Delhi college student who was kidnapped, gang-raped, and died late last month, represents the treatment of India by its politicians, said a human rights group for Indian minorities on Tuesday.

Jyoti Singh Pandey

“Thugs like Ms. Pandey’s murderers mirror the behavior of New Delhi’s leadership,” said Bhajan Singh, Founding Director of US-based Organization for Minorities of India (OFMI). “The Indian State habitually promotes instigators of full-scale massacres to the highest political offices. From Narendra Modi to Sumedh Saini and L. K. Advani to Kamal Nath, politicians who use rape, torture, and murder are rewarded with positions of greater and greater power. When India’s rulers are role models for sadism, they can hardly expect the citizenry to display a superior level of morality.”

Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, directed police to stand down as rioters systematically massacred nearly 2,000 Muslims in 2002. Saini, Director General of Police in Punjab, led death squads against Sikhs in the 1990s. Advani, a senior leader of the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party and former Deputy Prime Minister, oversaw the 1992 destruction of the historical Babri Mosque and massacre of over 1,000 Muslims in resultant riots. Nath, Union Cabinet Member for Urban Development, distributed weapons and ordered the murder of Sikhs during the 1984 Delhi Pogrom.

“Protesters who are rightly furious at the atrocious treatment of Ms. Pandey are demanding the death penalty for her six attackers,” remarked Bhajan Singh. “But where is the justice for Christians raped in Orissa in 2008, Muslims raped in Gujarat in 2002, Sikhs raped in Delhi in 1984, or Dalits raped on a daily basis? There is none because the Indian State is in the business, not of justice, but of keeping itself in business.”

Nun Sister Meena Lalita Barwa was gang-raped during anti-Christian riots in Orissa. She survived, but was paraded half-naked past a group of police officers who “ignored her and talked in a ‘very friendly’ manner to her attackers.” After anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, a Citizen’s Initiative reported “the most bestial forms of sexual violence – including rape, gang rape, mass rape.” In her article “Genocide in Gujarat,” anthropologist Angana Chatterji wrote: “Violence took place within sight of the local police stations…. Police officers often refused to come to the aid of Muslims, or took active part in the violence, to the point of shooting and striking at Muslims as they ran from the mobs.”

The humiliation of Sikh women during the 1984 Delhi Pogrom was one of the most extensive acts of ethnically targeted abuse in Indian history. In its report, “Twenty Years of Impunity,” rights group Ensaaf documented atrocities like the rape of Gurdip Kaur. A mob killed her husband and three of her sons, gang-raped her in front of her youngest son, killed him, and then left her to tell the tale. Many other women, reports Ensaaf, “were raped in front of their families. The rapists then either took the women home with them or left them naked in the streets.” Members of Parliament such as Nath were witnessed offering cash bounties to kill Sikhs, but none were ever prosecuted.

Although the Pandey case has received significant publicity, recent headlines reveal similar assaults on Dalits — the outcastes of Indian society — are a near daily occurrence: Jan. 5 — “Minor Dalit girl raped in Punjab”; Jan. 3 — “Dalit girl raped by engineering student in Haryana”; Jan. 2 — “Dalit alleges gangrape, no action taken so far”; Dec. 19 — “8-year-old Dalit girl raped, killed in Bihar”; Dec. 13 — “Dalit widow gang-raped; 4 arrested”; Dec. 8 — “Pregnant Dalit woman gang-raped.”

A judicial committee headed by J. S. Verma, a former Indian Supreme Court Chief Justice, was appointed on December 22 to identify legislative solutions to the national scourge of sexual assault. Among the solutions suggested so far are swifter trials and tougher penalties for accused assailants.

Questioning the sincerity of the Central Government’s proposed solutions, OFMI’s Press Secretary Arvin Valmuci said: “The hypocrisy of the Indian State is beyond belief. Witness the 1992 arrest of over 100 police officers for the arbitrary detention, torture, and gang-rape of 18 female Dalits from Tamil Nadu. As for swift trials, it took 19 years to convict anyone. As for tough penalties, the harshest sentence was 10 years in prison while most received only two years. When random thugs brutalize an innocent woman, the state talks tough. Yet when the state itself commits mass atrocities against the most marginalized inhabitants of South Asia, there is no justice.”

Torture, claims OFMI, is standard practice for police in most circumstances. Furthermore, a 2011 report by the organization entitled, “Demons Within: The Systematic Practice of Torture by Indian Police,” states: “The practice of rape as a form of torture by police officers is systemic and borders on universal in their interactions with female detainees. Most tragically, many of those abused by the police first approached the authorities to file a report of rape by non-governmental assailants.”

The use of torture is legal under Indian law, which provides no definition of torture or prohibition of its practice. Torture and related abuses by Indian security forces are actually protected by Section 197 of the Indian Criminal Procedure Code, which grants immunity to any government official accused of committing a criminal act in his official capacity. India has, to date, failed to ratify the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture.