On a day the government pulled out all stops to turn the swearing-in of Narendra Modi as chief minister into a grand gala event, a tribal town just about 150 kms away, in his own Gujarat, plunged into gloom and pulled down its shutters to mourn the rape and murder of a two and a half year old daughter of a watchman.
The innocent girl child was raped by a maternal uncle and thereafter dumped into a thorny bush by the wayside in Halol town of Panchmahals district on Friday night. The girl who battled for life in a Vadodara hospital finally gave up on Tuesday evening. The doctors attributed the death to severe internal injuries.
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An administration too engrossed in turning the chief minister’s milestone event into a momentous one had little time for the grieving of a town of 75,000 population which shut shop to a man in sympathy with a poor soul whose two and a half year old daughter had been brutally torn into by a father of four and then dumped to die. With streets deserted and shutters down, the town resembled a curfew hit place.
While in far off Delhi, all hell has broken loose , the barbarism perpetrated on a two and a half year old child in the Gujarat of development messiah Modi has not stirred a soul in the administration. "There is no one to hear the anguished cries of the a poor man like me. I want justice for the killer of my daughter," says Hariprasad, the father, as he waits outside the post-mortem venue.
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The state government considers silence the better part of valour. So far there has been no announcement or expression of shock from the administration.
The accused, himself a watchman in a nearby town, had come to the Halol home of the relative. After dinner, he took the child out, raped her and dumped her into the bushes. He was caught by some youth while fleeing, roundly thrashed and handed over to the police. The child was rushed to the local government hospital but since there was no gynaecologist, she was rushed to Vadodara where she died later.
