15 yeras ago 200 women lynched rapist in court, cut-off his private part

Nagpur/Pune/Hyderabad, December 3, 2019: The brutal gang rape and murder of a veterinary doctor in Hyderbad has caused uproar in the whole country demanding public lynching of the four rapists.

It takes years for courts to conclude trials and more years to execute the convicts. People are demanding that the four rapists should be executed immediatly. In 2004, similar incident had happened in a Nagpur court.

Bharat Kalicharan (1972 – August 13, 2004), also known as Akku Yadav, was a 32-year-old rapist, extortionist, and accused murderer. Following a decade of criminal activity and rape allegations, a bail hearing was scheduled for Yadav on August 13, 2004, in Nagpur District Court, and word spread through the adjoining neighborhood that he would be released.

Hundreds of women marched from the slums to the court carrying vegetable knives and chili powder. When Akku Yadav appeared, he saw a woman whom he had raped and shouted that he would rape her again. The woman started hitting him with her sandal.

Yadav was then lynched by a mob of around 200 women from Kasturba Nagar, a slum of Nagpur. Yadav was stabbed over seventy times, and chili powder and stones were thrown in his face. One of his alleged victims also hacked off his penis. This lynching occurred in the Nagpur District Court No. 7 on the marble floor of the courtroom.

The women who killed Yadav claimed that he had been raping and abusing local women with impunity for over a decade and that the local police had refused to help his victims or pursue charges because Yadav was bribing the police. Yadav had also reportedly murdered at least three people and dumped their bodies on local railroad tracks.

Two weeks before the lynching, Yadav was reported to have come to the home of Usha Narayane, a local activist, with several dozen of his men and threatened to rape her and throw acid in her face. When Narayane threatened to blow up her home using gas, Yadav and his men fled, and a mob burned down Yadav’s home.

After Yadav was lynched in the courtroom, five women were immediately arrested but released following demonstrations in the city. Every woman living in the local slum claimed responsibility for the lynching. Usha Narayane was arrested and charged with murder, as were other women. In 2012, Narayane was acquitted.

Twenty-one other people, including six women, were also arrested and released due to lack of evidence. A judge noted a lack of reliable witnesses to the lynching, including unreliable police statements, and cited Yadav’s autopsy report, which showed alcohol in Yadav’s system, as proof that Yadav was receiving preferential treatment from police.

In 2013, Akku Yadav’s nephew, Aman Yadav, was stabbed to death following similar circumstances.