Adult men rarely complain of being gang-raped. When a BHU student, in his first year of MA, complained of being abducted and raped by some men, he invited disbelief and scorn. The police refused to entertain his complaint; the university warned him against making the matter public, and the medical examination, conducted 10 days after the incident, concluded there was no evidence of him having been raped.

A village postmaster’s son, he has been studying in the BHU campus for the past four years. Still traumatised a fortnight after the incident, the victim told Outlook that nothing really had prepared him for the ordeal. He was walking towards the hostel mess for dinner around 9.30 pm on August 13, he recalled, when he was abducted by five men in a car.

With handkerchiefs tied around their faces, they first gagged him, then his back was burnt with cigarette butts and he was forced to swallow a large volume of alcohol till he felt giddy and passed out. When he regained consciousness he found himself in excruciating pain, lying in an area inside campus where...