Prayers were said at churches across India yesterday for an elderly nun who was gang-raped at a convent in an attack that has intensified anger over sexual violence and fueled fears among beleaguered Christians.
The attack on the 71-year-old comes just days after India banned a documentary about the 2012 gang rape of a student in Delhi, and with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi promising to crack down on religious violence and ensure freedom of worship for all faiths.
The nun was attacked late on Friday after a gang of about half a dozen robbers broke into a convent school in the eastern state of West Bengal and ransacked the premises, police said.
Photo: AFP
The robbers gagged a security guard before assaulting the nun. They then entered the principal’s room and stole cash, a laptop and a mobile phone, police said.
Four of the six attackers have been identified through closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage and a reward of 100,000 rupees (US$1,580) is on offer for any leads on the suspects.
Police superintendent Arnab Ghosh said the robbery appeared to have been carefully planned.
Photo: AFP
“CCTV footage showed that six men, aged between 20 and 30, scaled the boundary wall around 11:40pm and entered the school and disconnected the telephone lines,” he told reporters. “At least two of them were armed and the rest were carrying burglary tools. In the chapel, a holy scripture was found torn and... a bust of Jesus was broken.”
Prayers were held yesterday at churches in West Bengal for the nun, who is recuperating at a hospital in Ranaghat, about 70km from Kolkata.
“In our Sunday Mass, we prayed for the sister to recover quickly from trauma, fear and her physical injuries. We will pray for her again this evening,” Kolkata Archbishop Thomas D’Souza told reporters. “They not only committed a heinous crime, but they also vandalized the chapel... This is the first time such an attack has happened in India.”
In the western state of Goa, which has a sizeable Christian population, the attack was condemned during the morning Mass while there were also prayers for the nun in New Delhi.
The gang rape has added to the sense of fear and dismay among India’s Christian minority which has been deeply upset by a spate of attacks on churches, with Modi recently promising to crack down on religious violence.
The premier had been heavily criticized for not speaking out earlier against religious violence and has also faced flak for remaining silent about a recent spate of mass “re-conversions” of Christians and Muslims to Hinduism.
“Even if you call it an isolated incident, the background and the atmosphere for such an attack had already been there, so you cannot simply ignore it as a one-off incident,” Delhi diocese spokesman Father Savarimuthu Sankar told reporters.
The incident also adds to a grim record of sexual assaults in India, which last week banned a documentary about a December 2012 gang rape which sparked domestic and international outrage.
Authorities said screening the documentary could have caused public disorder, but critics accused the government of being more concerned with India’s reputation than the safety of its women.
The gang rape of a young physiotherapy student highlighted the frightening level of violence against women in the world’s second most populous nation and triggered mass protests.
It led to a major reform of India’s rape laws, speeding up trials and increasing penalties, although many campaigners say little has changed for women.
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