In an appalling incident from West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, an 11-year-old girl was raped and mutilated by her cousin’s boyfriend, Shahar Ali Sadar, on Thursday, March 24. The girl was dumped near a fishery in the Basirhat area. Locals who found her informed the police.

An official from the district police added that she was bleeding profusely and was rushed to hospital in critical condition. Official sources state that upon the victim’s medical examination, doctors found that the accused “had not only raped her but also shoved a stick in her private parts.”

The minor was then moved to the RGK Medical College in Kolkata, where a team of five doctors attended to her. Doctors have operated on her private parts for about 3 hours on Friday night; her condition remains unstable.

The victim was a resident of Nehalpur, which falls under the Matia police station area, and was visiting her aunt’s house in Matia village. A cousin sister introduced the minor to her boyfriend, the accused. Seeing that the child had not returned home at night, the family started a search and reported to the police the following morning. Within half an hour of the missing report being lodged, the child was traced near the fishery.

The police arrested Shahar Ali as an accused in this case on Friday. Ali, in his early-20s, is the boyfriend of the victim’s cousin and is a resident of Howrah’s Domjur district and has been booked under the protection of children from sexual offences (POCSO) Act.

The accused was produced at a court in Basirhat and sentenced to 6 days of police remand. Apart from the accused, police have also arrested the victim’s relative, who assisted him in the crime. During interrogation, police learned that the accused had promised the victim’s cousin some money and a new phone if she arranged to bring her younger cousin, the victim, to him and leave her with him overnight.

The accused lured the victim with promises of gifts and took her to a secluded area on his bike. The accused also acknowledged that he had assumed that the girl was dead, and hence he discarded her behind the fishery.

The Bengal BJP has taken up the case of this horrifying rape of a minor and attacked the TMC-led state government for the total lack of safety for women & girls in the state. On Sunday, a delegation of BJP MLAs went to the hospital but was forbidden from meeting the victim. BJP members alleged that the security staff had locked entrances to the gynaecology department.

“The patient is admitted to the gynaecology department. As soon as they saw us, the civic volunteers and security guards started putting shackles on the building’s door. We were told we wouldn’t be allowed in,” claimed Englishbazar MLA Sreerupa Mitra Chaudhury, who went to the hospital as a part of the delegation.
Chaudhury questioned why the TMC MP from Bashirhat, Nusrat Jahan, had not spoken to the girl’s family who belong to the Muslim community.

BJP also demanded justice for a Birbhum health worker who was recently raped and murdered inside a health centre.

Here, we must reiterate that Bashirhat, the home constituency of TMC MP Nusrat Jahan, has become an epicenter of sexual violence against women of all ages. Activist Rakhi Mitra has spoken about the bone-chilling sexual violence directed against Hindu women in Minakhan and Hingalganj blocks of Basirhat subdivision, as part of the post-poll state-sponsored pogrom by TMC.

Despite being a woman MP, Jahan has maintained a disturbing silence in all these cases and has never used her position to speak up against these increasing atrocities. She is instead busy with such inanities. Jahan, who is often found posting dance clips on her social media or working on the item number for Bangladeshi productions, has recently made an absurd claim in Parliament about Bharat’s soil not being ‘capable enough’ to support bullet trains.