It is three years that the Vasco 7 year old little girl was mercilessly raped in broad day light in the toilet of Deep Vihar School run by the Mormugao Port Trust where she was studying in the second standard. While the little girl and her grief stricken parents relentlessly quest for justice, the alleged rapist and his accomplice are still free birds possibly scouting for their next catch.
After that gruesome rape on January 14th 2013, the police were informed only three hours after the rape while the school staff high-handedly washed away all the evidence. The victim received medical attention only eight hours after she was brutally raped while she got counseling only 15 days later. The little girl’s family may have been very poor but justice should not have eluded them. Her family not being affluent or influential is why the authorities succeeded in a cover up and deliberately botching up the investigation.
What was however very shattering was that despite this heinous crime against a 7 year old, the then Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar never ever cared to visit the victim and her grieving family. It was appalling that he dared show such insensitivity while the police methodically hushed up the case. Incidentally on the day of the rape it was local Mormugao MLA Milind Naik’s birthday and the party in the very neighborhood of that ghastly crime went on, with even the decibels not lowered.
If only the victim was a daughter of a Minister, a cash loaded businessman or an affluent citizen, the case would have been cracked in a day or two if not hours. Indeed, sorrowing lies the state of lawlessness and disorder.
We are living in times where justice is no longer our right. It has become the privilege of the rich and the well connected. If we are made to believe that the police should be left alone and that law will take its own course, we are being led into fairy land. That is why we have Courts to ensure that justice is done, but if Courts also turn into monsters of injustice the end product is a lawless jungle, which sadly Goa is already.
Let us continue to keep the little wounded girl and her shattered family in our thoughts. The authorities may have abandoned them, but we cannot.
