india

Updated: May 13, 2019 23:54 IST

A woman was on Monday battling for her life with 70% burns at a Delhi hospital two days after she set herself on fire following Uttar Pradesh police’s alleged refusal to lodge her gang rape complaint.

The police allegedly turned her away as she repeatedly sought to file the complaint in Uttar Pradesh’s Hapur that she was raped after her family sold her for Rs10,000.

The woman, who is in her 30s, set herself on fire at her house in Moradabad.

In his statement to the police, the woman’s father has refuted allegations levelled against him by his daughter. HT could not contact the family of the woman.

The woman’s family also resides in Hapur, circle officer Rajesh Kumar Singh said.

Hapur’s police superintendent, Yashveer Singh, said a rape and harassment case was lodged on Sunday against 16 residents of Hapur’s Shyampur Jat village on the woman’s complaint.

He said the woman alleged her father and aunt sold her to a Shyampur Jat resident in 2014 for Rs10,000.

The man, she alleged, would send her to different houses to work as a maid and that her employers raped and harassed her.

In a purported video of the woman, accessed by HT, which went viral on the social media, she is heard accusing the Hapur police of inaction and that it left her with no option but to immolate herself.

Singh said the woman had eloped with a neighbour from Shyampur Jat about four years ago and had been staying in Moradabad since.

“She immolated herself in Moradabad on Saturday and was admitted to a Ghaziabad hospital from where she was shifted to Delhi. A report has been lodged at Babugarh police station on her complaint. Further investigation is on,” Singh said.

Singh said a police team was sent to the village to record the statement of villagers, who claimed the woman was trying to implicate them in the “fake rape and harassment case”.

Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) chairperson Swati Maliwal on Monday took cognisance of the case and wrote a letter to Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath seeking justice for the woman.

“DCW is in receipt of a representation from a survivor of gang-rape belonging to Hapur. The survivor has suffered unimaginable harassment at the hands of the UP [Uttar Pradesh] police in Hapur who have refused to register an FIR [First Information Report] despite repeated complaints,” Maliwal said in her letter to Adityanath.

“This insensitivity and shameful conduct of the UP police compelled the survivor to immolate herself,” she said.

Maliwal said the woman was forced to work in houses as domestic help without any remuneration after she was allegedly sold to a person who harassed her. “That person had borrowed money from several people and in return, the survivor was forced to work as a domestic help at the houses of these persons without any remuneration. Here, she was subjected to continuous harassment and gang-rape.”

Maliwal quoted the woman as saying she had approached Babugarh police station as well as Hapur police superintendent, but no case was registered.