The tragic death of an Indian schoolgirl has laid bare the consequences of ‘Eve-teasing’, a popular South Asian euphemism that many say trivialises the street harassment and assault of women.
The short CCTV video of two Indian girls riding bicycles starts off quite innocuously. Dressed in their school uniform, the teenagers were riding side by side on a near-empty road.
However, within seconds, two men on a motorbike overtook them and one of them pulled away the scarf of one of the girls which led her to lose her balance her cycle moved right and collided with a second motorbike coming from behind.
As she and the riders fell on the road, the 17-year-old was run over by a third motorbike coming from the opposite direction.
“The moment I saw my daughter, I knew she was dead,” says her father Sabhajit Varma, who arrived at the scene within minutes after receiving a call from his niece – the other girl in the CCTV footage.
“Some people had gathered and we loaded her onto a tempo [a small vehicle used to transport goods] and rushed to a hospital,” he told me on the phone from his home.
“Doctors said she was ‘brought dead’. They said her jaw was shattered and she had died from severe injuries to her head,” he said. “There were no last words, no goodbyes.”
Mr Varma’s wife died eight years ago and after his two older daughters were married, the 17-year-old, the youngest of three, was the only one living with him. She was good at studies and wanted to be a doctor, he tells me.
Two days before her death, he said, she’d told him that some boys had been harassing her and other girls outside their school. Since then, his niece and other students have also told police that the young men used to hover around their school morning and evening, sometimes racing their bikes.
His daughter’s death has left Mr Varma heartbroken and angry. “My daughter was murdered. The men who killed her must be hanged,” he says.
The incident took place last month in Ambedkar Nagar district of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Police have arrested three suspects – reports say at least one of them is a minor – and are looking for a fourth man.
