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Protests have engulfed the Indian state of West Bengal after the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, the subsequent lynching of an innocent man and the police killing of one of the accused.
Outrage erupted on Sunday after the body of a missing girl was recovered from a pond in a town just outside the state capital, Kolkata.
Police said the child had been raped and then stuffed into a sack and thrown into the pond while still alive. According to the autopsy, she had suffered an extreme blow to the head and her body showed bites and scratches.
The grotesque assault prompted fury from the local community, who set upon a 26-year-old man they believed was responsible. When police detained the main suspects, the man who had been killed was not among those named in connection with the case and the government said he was innocent.
The incident escalated into a political row after the recently elected state government, run by the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) – which is also in charge of the central government – was accused by political opponents of failing to protect women and of a decline in law and order in the state.
Family members have alleged that the police initially did not take the incident seriously and that they were forced to look for the girl themselves, checking CCTV cameras in the local area. Police have not responded to the allegations.
In the protests that erupted after her body was recovered, local shops were vandalised and police officers targeted.
Tensions escalated further on Tuesday after police shot and killed Pravash Mondal, the main suspect, after an alleged attempt by him to snatch a police gun and escape, according to officers at the scene.
The circumstances of the so-called police “encounter killing” have been questioned by opposition figures, who said it raised concerns over the rule of law. Similar police killings of criminal suspects have been widely documented in other BJP-ruled states but were previously unusual in West Bengal.
Women’s safety was already a contentious political issue in the state. The rape and murder of a trainee doctor at a government hospital in Kolkata in 2024 had become a pivotal subject in the state elections, which took place in April, and was seen as one of the issues that brought down the previous government after 15 years in power.
Workers from the BJP and the opposition Trinamool Congress party came to blows this week and a ban on public gatherings is now in force across the state, with paramilitary officers deployed to sensitive areas.
The state’s newly elected BJP chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, said the government was committed to preventing violent attacks against women and visited the rape victim’s family on Tuesday.
However, Adhikari, a hardline Hindu nationalist whose previous comments against Muslims have caused controversy, was also accused of seeking to communalise the incident, in particular the incident of the deadly mob attack on the suspect.
The young girl who was raped was Muslim, while her alleged attackers – who police say have confessed – were Hindu. The man killed by a mob was also Hindu.
Adhikari suggested that the attack on the Hindu man had a “communal connection” and that there was a “political conspiracy” behind the violence. More than 30 people have since been arrested over the lynching and the wider violence.
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