In an incident that has brought shame to the state of punjA 14-year-old girl died and her mother is in hospital with severe injuries after they were thrown off a moving bus in Moga, Punjab, on Wednesday for resisting molestation attempts by a group of men.
Three persons, including the bus conductor and cleaner, have been arrested and booked for murder.
The teenager, her mother and younger brother boarded the private bus from their village in Moga district, to visit a gurdwara last evening. There were only a handful of passengers at the time.
“They kept abusing us. No one helped. They first pushed my daughter off the bus, then me,” the girl’s mother, who was unconscious for nearly 12 hours at a district hospital, said on Thursday.
The harassment allegedly began the moment the family got on the bus. “The conductor refused to give my daughter a ticket,” said the woman, 38.
Around 10 km into the journey, a passenger allegedly started misbehaving with the girl. When the woman tried to save her daughter, she was attacked too. The bus conductor, instead of helping them, allegedly also joined in and started abusing both mother and daughter.
In desperation, the woman ran to the driver and begged him to stop the bus, but he allegedly kept driving.
The woman and her daughter were allegedly harassed by half a dozen men, said to be the driver’s friends, until the bus slowed down at a turn. The woman alleges that she and her daughter were then pushed off the bus.
As hours passed before they could get any medical help, the girl died on the road.
Sexual crimes became the focus of a national debate after the horrific gang-rape and torture of a young woman on a moving bus in Delhi in December, 2012. That incident forced the government to bring major changes in laws on rape and other crimes.
