Grief: The mother of one of the victims of a gang-rape in Uttar Pradesh holds a schoolbook that belonged to her daughter. Credit:AFP The same night a 35-year-old woman, who had walked into a police station in the Sumerpur district seeking the release of her husband, was raped by station house officer Rahul Pandey when she refused to pay a bribe. Three constables stood calmly by, watching mute and unfazed by their senior officer’s behaviour. Then on Thursday morning came the discovery of a 16-year-old girl, also hanging from a tree, yet another victim of an apparent gang-rape. All of the women were from the lowest rungs of India’s caste system, while all of the alleged culprits were from the higher Yadav caste, traditionally a middle-ranking pastoral community. "These men act with a kind of depraved sense of impunity," Ranjana Kumari, a prominent women’s rights campaigner and director of the Centre for Social Research in Delhi, says.

Outrage: Police use a water cannon to stop demonstrators from moving towards the office of Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav. Credit:Reuters "They act by ignoring the laws, and they are behaving that way because the men who run the state encourage them. Men know that no one will ever do anything to punish them. The chief minister, the bureaucrats, the police, they all take the same attitude, they do not care." To be sure, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav, who was branded India’s worst chief minister this week on the cover of the national news weekly magazine Outlook, has spent the last two weeks blithely dismissing the gang-rapes as a media beat-up. Yet the figures tell a different story. Since Mr Yadav led his Samajwadi Party to victory in state elections in 2012, a culture of rampant lawlessness, or "goonda raj", appears to have taken hold over the state. In the past two years there have been 10 rapes reported every day, more than 23,000 reported incidents against women and nearly 8000 kidnapping and abduction cases. On Thursday Mr Yadav, widely derided as the cat’s paw of his father Mulayam Singh Yadav, who is a former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and now a federal MP, spent the day trying to woo the crowd at a conference for international investors.

"These rapes have little to do with sex, it’s all about caste,” Badri Narayan, of the Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute and an expert on Dalit politics, says. "Rape is a tool of oppression, of punishment, of humiliation, and hanging women from trees serves as a warning to others." After Uttar Pradesh’s voters hammered Mr Yadav's political party in the recent national elections, giving it only five seats out of 80 while Narendra Modi’s BJP swept up 71, Professor Narayan says there has been an atmosphere of revenge. The victims, Professor Narayan says, belong to constituencies that were formerly held by the Samajwadi Party, and are believed to have voted either for the BJP or another alternative. "We don’t know exactly, of course, who the victims voted for, but that is the perception and now we have these thugs roaming the villages seeking vengeance, looking to punish the Dalits, and sending the message about who is really in control," he says. Vivek Kumar, another expert on caste politics from Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, believes that it is not just about how people might have voted.

"Dalits are speaking up, asking for their rights, they want land reform, they want legal rights, and the Yadav caste feels threatened by that, and so they use rape and murder to stop the lower caste people from attaining those rights," he says. Despite the national media attention on the crimes, Professor Kumar expects similar incidents to increase. "This is a very large, very rural state with very few police officers," he says. "We are talking about hundreds of small villages and communities where women have basically no protection as soon as they step outside their door. I think we [will] see increasing rates of this kind of violence as the Yadavs try to assert and reinforce their control." As the novelist Meena Kandasamy wrote this week in the national magazine India Today: "Rape becomes a dangerous weapon of war in the hands of caste-Hindu men who use it to sustain a system that keeps intact their supremacy". S.R. Darapuri, a retired senior police officer who spent his career working across Uttar Pradesh, says the one thing that could help deter violence against women is a speedy and responsive justice system. However, he says, such a system does not exist in Uttar Pradesh.

"Women walk into police stations and the police tell them to go away," Mr Darapuri says. "If the police do make an investigation report then they usually wait a few days until they know most of the evidence has been tampered with." If a case finally gets to court, Mr Darapuri says, then the culprit knows he has many ways to drag out the proceedings over years. "The culprit knows how poor the victims are, that they cannot afford to leave their homes and their land to be appearing in court, and the result is that in the vast majority of cases that get to court, the accused is acquitted," he says. Gobinda Pal, director of the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies in Delhi, says another problem for lower caste communities is their political fragmentation. "Unfortunately these lower caste communities in Uttar Pradesh are divided among themselves, which makes them even weaker," Dr Pal says. "Someone who makes a complaint knows that they are under constant threat, that might be only the beginning of more harassment, more threats. In India, power and caste are two sides of the same coin."

This week, India’s new Prime Minister used his first speech to parliament to finally break his silence over the spate of rapes in Uttar Pradesh, and promise action. "Respecting and protecting women should be a priority of the 1.25 billion people in this country," Mr Modi said. "All these incidents should make us introspect. The government will have to act. The country won't wait and people won't forget."