\'If the Police Had Done Something, She Would Be Alive Today\'

Raveendran/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesPolice officials walking alongside women protesters during a rally in Delhi, calling for better safety of women, on Dec. 30.

The family of Paramjeet Kaur sat huddled in the dusty courtyard outside their house on Monday afternoon as a stream of senior police officers, politicians and villagers arrived to pay their condolences after Ms. Kaur killed herself on Dec. 26, nearly six weeks after she was raped by two men.

The family kept asking: Where were all these people when their 18-year-old daughter had sought justice from the vil lage council of Badshahpur and the police, only to be humiliated and pressured to strike a deal with her rapists?

“They are all here now, but nobody helped us then,” said Charanjit Kaur, 28, Ms. Kaur's sister, as she sat against the whitewashed wall, her knees drawn up to her chin. “If the police had done something, she would be alive today.”

As national anger rises over the gang rape of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi, the Punjab police are being criticized for driving Ms. Kaur, who once dreamed of being a police officer herself, to drink poison and kill herself. Activists have long complained that India's largely male police force is not sensitive in handling sex crimes and fails to investigate them rigorously.

Ms. Kaur's suicide “reinforces everything we have been saying,” said Kalpana Viswanath, a women's rights activist based in Delhi. “There is no seriousness by the police when it comes to crimes against women.â €

The victim in Punjab was drugged and raped repeatedly on Nov. 13 and left unconscious near a gurudwara, a Sikh place of worship, according to a report filed with the police. She reported the rape five days later, but her complaint was not registered until Nov. 27. After that, family members said they and the victim were called to the station day after day, and made to sit from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Ms. Kaur accused two men of raping her and named a third man who she said gave the keys to his shed where the rape took place. The accused lived in neighboring villages. One worked for a middleman involved in the trade of farm produce and the others for local businessmen. They are being held at the local police station where the victim made her first complaint, but as of Monday had not yet been charged.

The family said that the local police humiliated Ms. Kaur, asking her repeatedly to describe the crime in graphic detail. “They asked very dirty questions,” sa id Harvinder Kaur, 28, Ms. Kaur's cousin, who accompanied her to the police station. “They even questioned her character.”

She said the police asked Ms. Kaur, “How many times have you had sex before?”

For over a month, the police did not arrest the three men, instead allowing village elders to try to broker a deal among the families. Elders wanted to get Ms. Kaur married to one of the men or pressured the family to settle the matter by accepting money.

During this time, police officers constantly tried to dissuade the family from pursuing the complaint, Harvinder Kaur said. She recalled that they asked, “How long will you keep running to the courts? What will you get from filing this complaint? You are poor; why don't you settle the matter?”

Forcing a rape victim to marry her rapists is a common practice in South Asia. At the prayer service for Ms. Kaur on Monday morning, at least two dozen people said marriage to an attacker is the ideal solution in cases of rape. “In a small place, what will happen if everyone finds out?” asked Raj Singh, the head of the panchayat, or the village's local government. “This way, the girl's honor is saved, the family's honor is saved,” he said.

Gurinder Singh, 51, called it “the most socially acceptable solution.”

“If the man and the woman can adjust, what's the problem?” he said.

In India, a woman who has been raped inevitably faces discrimination and social stigma. The people of Badshahpur said Ms. Kaur had been stripped off her “respect” and “honor.”

The reason she decided to take the matter to the police, Harvinder Kaur said, is that “she had already lost her respect, so why won't she fight till the end?”

For fear of being shamed, Paramjeet Kaur moved to her cousin's house in the neighboring village of Samana, where for weeks, village elders and the men she accused pressured her to drop her complaint in exchange for money.

“She was scared,” said Harvinder Kaur. “So much had happened, and the accused were still roaming freely.”

Paramjeet Kaur's family of six â€" her parents, two sisters and a brother â€" has a monthly income of less than $100. She lived with her parents and one sister in a dilapidated one-room house. A double bed takes up most of the space, and a small cupboard holds their few possessions. Her father, 60, works as a private security guard. After Ms. Kaur's death, the government of Punjab has given her older sister, Charanjit, a job as a peon in the state's revenue department.

Ms. Kaur, who wanted to join the police force, had to drop out of school after ninth grade because the family could no longer pay for her education. They had mortgaged their house for $4,000 to send their only son to the Indian Army, where he is a junior officer.

Since Ms. Kaur's death, action has been swift, partly because the state administration is keen to avoid protests of the kind that have swept Delhi for two weeks. Two officers were quickly dismissed, one of whom has been charged with abetting the suicide by failing to act on the woman's complaint, and a third officer has been suspended.

“They should have done their duty,” said Shashi Prabha Diwedi, an inspector general and a member of a three-member team formed to investigate the case. Their job, she said, was to register the complaint when the victim approached them and to arrest the accused immediately.