Hathras rape case: Video of UP police burning victim’s body

If the veracity of the footage and the identity of the body are established, it will be clearest proof yet that the girl’s immediate family was shut out of the last rites

Students of Jadavpur University during a protest rally against the Hathras incident in Calcutta.

Piyush Srivastava   |   TT   |   Lucknow   |   10.10.20  :  A television channel has aired footage showing a group in uniform and plainclothes preparing a pyre over a body wrapped in white cloth, pouring the contents of a jerry can and setting it alight purportedly at Hathras in Uttar Pradesh.
The father of the Dalit teenager who was brutalised and murdered last month in Hathras said the clips showed police burning the body of his daughter on September 30.  The father said he could recognise all the individuals in the footage as local policemen he had seen during visits to the police station and interactions since the death of his daughter. 
Uttar Pradesh police denied that they had forcibly burnt the body of the Hathras victim. State additional director-general of police (law and order) Praveen Kumar said he did “not recognise” the video. He accused the family of the Hathras girl of changing their statement “for reasons best known to them”. 
“Whatever was done there was done with the consent of the family. Some of the family members were present at the cremation site and all the rituals were followed,” Kumar added.
Narendra Pratap, the reporter who gathered the clips, told The Telegraph on phone: “I stand by the story. It is true that the girl’s body was burnt by the policemen.”
If the veracity of the footage and the identity of the body are established, it will be clearest proof yet that the girl’s immediate family was shut out of the last rites. The suspicions and allegations shrouding the cremation had served to transform the tragedy into a national issue, lending credence to suggestions that the government was keen to hush up the matter.
The Uttar Pradesh home department had left that matter vague in an affidavit to the Supreme Court earlier this week, merely referring to “family members” without identifying them by relation.
“The extraordinary circumstances and sequence of unlawful incidents… forced the district administration to take the extraordinary step of cremating the victim at night in presence of family members who agreed to attend to avoid further violence,” the state government’s affidavit had said. 
“The cremation of the victim was performed with full rites and customs,” the affidavit had added subsequently. 
If the authenticity of the latest clips is upheld, it would also raise questions whether emptying the contents of a jerry can meets the description of “rites and customs”.
The latest footage, which appeared to have been shot on a mobile phone, shows men in plainclothes and in uniform placing logs, planks and dried dung on a body wrapped in a white cloth and setting the mound on fire by pouring the contents of a white container. 
The family has accused the police of forcibly burning the body of the victim after locking them up. An uncle of the girl had said he had been forcibly taken by the police to the site of the burning to register the token presence of a family member.
On September 30 night, television news channels had shown footage of the alleged burning of the body from a distance. The clips aired on Friday are far more clear.
Prem Prakash Meena, subdivisional magistrate of Hathras district, had told reporters on September 30 that “the family members of the victim were present during the cremation. We have made many videos of their presence during the last rites of the victim.”
The controversy can be set to rest if edited excerpts of the video — showing the family members with their identity masked — are made public or shown to a group of independent observers or a civil society group. 
For some reason, the Yogi Adityanath government has not taken such an initiative so far.
The father of the victim told reporters in Hathras on Friday: “We are not surprised to see the video and can identify every policeman in it, even if they are in plainclothes. We knew what exactly happened that day as some villagers were present there. The policemen brought my daughter’s body from Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi in an ambulance.
The ambulance was parked in front of our house for a few minutes. Then some policemen locked the door of our house from outside and took the body to an agricultural field and burnt her hurriedly by using cow dung and wood collected from Rajput households in the village.”
The four persons arrested for the gang rape and murder of the girl belong to the Rajput caste.
The father of the girl said no tradition or ritual was followed. 
“The video exposes the Yogi Adityanath government’s false affidavit in the Supreme Court that (the cremation) was done according to our wishes and because there was apprehension of violence. The government has lied to the Supreme Court.”