Three men including a police officer have been arrested in the latest atrocity in India.  Two teenage girls were gang raped and found hanging from a mango tree in Uttar Pradesh.  The case threatens wider upheaval because the girls are from a lower caste and the cops and the culprits are from the region’s dominant caste.

The girls were aged 14 and 15 years, and found hanging from mango trees in the village of Katra.  Autopsies confirmed they died of strangulation from hanging.  When the bodies were discovered on Wednesday morning, angry villagers crowded the orchard and refused to move in protest of the police inaction.

The father of one of the girls is 45-year old agricultural worker Jeevan Lal, who says the girls were last seen alive in the company of a man named Pappu Yadav and two of his brothers in the mango orchard.  Another family member tried to intervene, but the Yadavs allegedly pulled a gun and chased him off. 

When he heard what had happened, the father went to the police.  But the cops, who are members of the Yadavs’ caste, “took the side of the culprits,” the father said.  “They abused and misbehaved with us.”

In addition to the arrested police officer, three more were suspended, and one fled the region before he could be arrested. 

Violence against women remains a widespread problem in India.  But the 2012 gang rape of a promising medical student aboard a bus in Delhi focused national attention on the problem.  And suspects who once might have been able to hide behind misogyny or their caste to avoid prosecution are now finding themselves social pariahs and facing charges and sentences all the way up to capital punishment.