17-year-old Neha Paswan was beaten to death by the male members of her extended family in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, because they didn’t like her wearing jeans.
The mother of Neha Paswan, 17, said her daughter’s grandfather and uncles beated her up with sticks in her own home over an argument about her clothes, according to the BBC.
She had kept a day-long religious fast. In the evening, she put on a pair of jeans and a top and performed her rituals. When her grandparents objected to her attire, Neha responded that jeans were made to be worn and that she would wear it,” Shakuntala Devi Paswan, told BBC Hindi.
After beating her to the point where she became unconscious, the men promised they would take the girl to the hospital and packed her into a rickshaw.
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However, Shakuntala Devi said this was the last time she saw her daughter alive.
They wouldn’t let me accompany them, so I alerted my relatives who went to the district hospital looking for her but couldn’t find her,” she told the BBC. She found her daughter’s body hanging over a bridge the following morning.
Neha Paswan, 17, was beaten to death by her grandfather and uncles with sticks for wearing a pair of jeans. She wanted to be a police officer, her mother says, a dream that won't ever be fulfilled.
No rage is enough for the contempt and violence with which India treats women. https://t.co/j3Q5119RaD
— #MeTooIndia (@IndiaMeToo) July 27, 2021
Shakuntala Devi added that her in-laws were often unhappy with the teenager as preferred to dress in modern clothing, and were pressuring the girl to drop out of school.
According to police officials the men had tried to throw the body over the bridge, but it got stuck instead.
Police has registered a case of murder and destruction of evidence against 10 people, including the girl’s aunts and cousins, according to local reports.
So far, authorities have arrested four people including the grandfather, two uncles and the auto-rickshaw driver. A search is on for the others.
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The girl had received serious head injuries when she was beaten up, which led to her death, the Indian Express quoted senior police official Yash Tripathi as saying.
The postmortem report also suggested she had received a “severe injury and fracture in the head!
However, this is not the first time such a horrific act of this nature was committed.
Life for girls is not safe wherever culture & religion is defined & “protected” by men.
Neha Paswan, 17, from Uttar Pradesh was beaten & hanged by grandfather & uncles for wearing jeans. She made them angry by insisting on going to school so she could join police force.
Sad. pic.twitter.com/1o7aDHGls5
— aamir ghauri (@aamirghauri) July 27, 2021
A 20-year-old girl was beaten by her father for running away from her abusive in-laws in central India’s Madhya Pradesh state last month. In another shocking incident, two girls were beaten up by their family members for talking on mobile phones in the state’s Dhar district.