India, Rajasthan: In Bikaner district in Rajasthan, a physical trainer and instructor (PTI) was arrested for allegedly raping and killing a Dalit girl in the hostel of their college. The body of the 17 year old girl was found in a water tank on Tuesday morning following which her parents lodged a complaint against trainer Vijendra Singh accusing him of raping and killing the girl, police said. Her parents also accused the teacher of murder.
The accused was arrested on Wednesday and under police custody, the police said. “It was alleged that the girl was raped in the hostel room of Vijendra on Monday night and later her body was found in the tank. She was pursuing BSTC (a course to become teacher) from the private college in Nokha,” the police said. The Dalit girl belonged to Barmer district. Local people, her relatives and public representatives including Leader of Opposition Rameshwar Dudi have demanded a probe into the matter.
From her small village near the Indo-Pak border in Barmer, the raped girl had travelled all the way to Bikaner to become a teacher. Her dream came to an end after she was allegedly raped and murdered by a teacher. While the police, prima facie, called it a case of suicide, the girl’s parents alleged that she was murdered and the body was later dumped in the water tank. The girl, originally a resident of Trimohi village near Gadra Road, Barmer, was enrolled in a Senior Teaching Certificate (STC) course at the Jain Adarsh Teacher Training College in Bikaner’s Nokha town.
The girl’s father has named the chairperson of the college, Ishwar Chandra Baid, hostel warden Priya Shukla and Vijendra Singh, a physical trainer and instructor employed at another school run by the same group, but who used to live on the campus, in the FIR. The second-year student used to live in a hostel inside the college campus. With the college closed for vacation, there were only four girls in the hostel at the time of the incident, the FIR said.
Around 8 pm on March 28, the girl called her father, telling him that warden Shukla had sent her to Vijendra’s room to clean it, and that Vijendra had raped her. Her father asked her to come to Nokha town the next day, but before they could meet her, he got a call from the police about her death. “The rape was confirmed and the PTI was arrested yesterday. We presented him before the magistrate today and have taken him on five-day remand. The other two are yet to be arrested,” Bikaner SP (rural) Satnam Singh told The Indian Express. “There were no injury marks on her body so we cannot say if it was murder, but we are awaiting forensic results to ascertain the cause of her death.” The college could not be reached for comment.