In India, a teenage girl was beaten to death and publicly hanged by the members of her family for wearing jeans during a holy ceremony.
Neha Paswan, 17, was reportedly beaten with sticks by her grandfather and uncles after she refused to change her jeans into traditional clothing during a religious festival.
The deadly beating happened last week in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, one of the nation’s least developed regions and India’s most populous state.
Shakuntala Devi Paswan, Neha’s mother, told that her daughter had put on a pair of jeans to perform religious rituals and this sparked an argument in the family’s home in the remote Savreji Kharg village in Uttar Pradesh.
“She had kept a day-long religious fast,” the grieving mother said. “In the evening, she put on a pair of jeans and a top and performed her rituals. When her grandparents objected to her attire, Neha retorted that jeans were made to be worn and that she would wear it.”
The argument escalated, resulting in the violence, she claims. Her relatives have complained about Neha’s attire which they deemed “inappropriate” and were angered when she refused to wear traditional clothing.
When the dispute turned brutal, the male relatives thrashed Naha with sticks and rods in their home in the village of Savreji Kharg in Deoria.
After the beating left the girl unconscious, male relatives said they were calling a rickshaw to take her to the hospital.
“They wouldn’t let me accompany them so I alerted my relatives who went to the district hospital looking for her but couldn’t find her,” Shakuntala said.
But on the way to the hospital, the rickshaw driver had stopped on a bridge and attempted to push Neha’s body into the river below.
The next morning, Shakuntala and her other relatives received news that a girl’s body was hanging from a bridge over the Gandak river that flows through the region, and upon inspection, it was found to be of her daughter’s.
Police officials said the men had tried to throw the body over the bridge, but it got stuck instead.
Police registered a case of murder and destruction of evidence against 10 people, including the girl’s aunts and cousins, according to local reports.
The authorities have arrested four people including the grandfather, two uncles, and the auto-rickshaw driver. A search is on for the remaining six fugitives.
Yash Tripathi, a senior police official said that the girl received serious head injuries when she was beaten up, leading to her death.
The postmortem report also suggested she had received a “severe injury and fracture in the head”.
Shakuntala said that her in-laws were pressuring Neha, an aspiring police officer, to abandon her studies in a local school, even though Amarnath Paswan, her father worked as a construction site laborer in Ludhiana, Punjab to pay for the girl’s education.
There is a history of the repressive treatment of women and girls in the region where misogynistic attacks are often sanctioned by family elders.
On average, 20 women are killed every day in India for bringing in insufficient dowries, BBC reported.
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