Indian girl’s death reveals gravity of South Asian street harassment.
The short CCTV video of two Indian girl riding bicycles begins innocuously enough. The youngsters were riding side by side on a nearly empty route, dressed in their school uniforms.
However, two males on a motorcycle overtook them and one of them yanked away one of the girls’ scarf, causing her to lose her balance. Her cycle slid right and collided with a second motorbike coming from behind.
A third motorcycle coming from the opposite direction ran over the 17-year-old as she and the other riders fell on the road.
“The moment I saw my daughter, I knew she was dead,” says her father, Sabhajit Varma, who arrived at the scene shortly after receiving a call from his niece, the other girl in the CCTV video.
“Some people had gathered, so we loaded her onto a tempo [a small vehicle used to transport goods] and rushed her to a hospital,” he explained over the phone from his home.
“Doctors declared her ‘brought dead.’ “They mentioned her jaw had shattered, and she succumbed to severe head injuries,” he explained. “There were no last words, no goodbyes.”
Mr. Varma’s wife passed away eight years ago, and after his two older daughters got married, he remained with only the 17-year-old, the youngest of three children. He tells me she was good in school and aspired to be a doctor.
He claimed she told him two days before her death that several boys were harassing her and other girls outside their school. His niece and other students have now told authorities that the young guys liked to hang around at their school in the morning and evening, occasionally racing their motorcycles.
Mr Varma is heartbroken and enraged as a result of his daughter’s death. Someone murdered my daughter. “The men who killed her must execution,” he says.
