I arrived in India on December 16, the same day a 23 year medical student was brutally gang-raped on a bus in Delhi. Her fight for life-- a fight she eventually lost-- was the only story anyone cared about in Delhi for the entire time I was there. The core of the downtown was often shut down-- the metro stations closed and the roads in and out barricaded-- as hundreds of thousands of Indians protested, first the brutality of the crime and Indian society's nonchalance towards violence against women, but eventually the inevitable police brutality directed against the protesters. Like everyone in Delhi at that time, I got to know her story well. The culprits have been caught and are facing widespread calls for the use of the death penalty . We've looked at this here through the prism of right-wing fanatics like Todd Akin, Phil Gingrey and Richard Mourdock, all of whom, like primitives in India believe in "legitimate rape" and have an inborn tendency to blame women for arousing men to commit the terrible crime.

In India, they use the "two finger rule" to check if a woman is promiscuous, in which case... well, how could it be rape? I watched Indian after India interviewed on TV-- rural ones, not people in the cities-- denouncing the horror of the rape... and then going on to talk about how women need to dress more modestly and stay at home unless she was with her father, husband or brother. A woman is raped every 20 minutes in India. And Friday night there was a horrifying replay in the Punjab, not far from the Sikh's holy city of Amritsar, of what happened one month ago in Delhi.

Six men have been arrested over the rape of a woman on a coach in northern India in an attack which has disturbing echoes of the gang-rape and murder of a student on a New Delhi bus just weeks ago.





The victim was traveling to her in-laws' home in Punjab on Friday when she was allegedly snatched and driven to a district bordering Amritsar, the Sikh holy city.





Five men joined the driver and conductor, who had taken her by motorbike to an unknown address, and took turns to rape the 29-year-old.





They dumped her near her in-laws' village the next morning where she told relatives of her ordeal, police said.





'Six men have been arrested on allegations of having raped a 29-year-old woman... after forcibly taking her to an unknown location on the night of January 11,' local police officer Raj Jeet Singh said.





A seventh suspect is still on the run from the police, he added.





'The lady, after being kidnapped, was raped brutally throughout the night by the seven accused,' he said.





'After raping the victim throughout the night, one of the accused dropped her near her in-laws' house the next morning where she narrated the whole incident to her two sisters-in-law.'





Asked why she had not resisted when she was being taken by motorcycle to the secluded spot where she was attacked, Superintendent Singh said she was 'a bit mentally weak,' the Indian Express reported.





The extent of the victims injuries had yet to be established, but an initial examination confirmed she had been raped, the Deccan Chronicle reported.





Local news services are reporting that the suspects have confessed during preliminary interrogations.