It was only when the tragic rape and murder of a woman in western Uttar Pradesh led to the eruption of protests outside New Delhi’s Safdarjang Hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries, that the spotlight was turned on a state that doggedly continues to cling to its reputation for abject lawlessness. Just hours earlier, in a horrific reminder of a case that had shaken India’s conscience and caused laws to be rewritten, another woman from the same part of the state was raped repeatedly by the driver and conductor of a bus and thrown on the Meerut-Delhi highway.

In August, another woman was raped on a bus from Uttar Pradesh to Delhi, and in June yet another. But this series of horrors appears not to have stirred the administration in Lucknow, nor the police force of the state, almost as if to suggest there is tacit acceptance of the worst that men can inflict on women. But while ordinary women who travel on inter-state buses believing they would be safe are routinely raped in Uttar Pradesh, the death in Delhi of a woman from Hathras has brought the anger of the Bhim Army to the boil. While this protest is caste-based, it will not take much for it to expand to gender and community because all women and sensible men realise that these outrages must stop.

It must amaze citizens of Uttar Pradesh that a police force that could react to the killing of its personnel by a gangster with such urgent despatch that he was captured within days and then conveniently slain in a suspicious encounter finds itself unable to check the repeated acts of violence on women. Rapid action in one case and relative inertia in others suggest exactly what the police’s priorities are. And to think that the state government had claimed last year to have ended the reign of goons in the state.

The National Crime Records Bureau had reported early this year that crimes against women had gone up in Uttar Pradesh by a whopping 20 per cent between 2016 and 2019. In 2018, as many as 4,322 women ~ of them 1,411 minors ~ were raped in the state. But rape was not the only crime inflicted on women; dowry deaths, domestic violence and kidnappings have also been common, suggesting that while gangsters may be popular targets for the administration, there are few checks on those who commit crimes against women. This must change, and it must change fast. Not because the victim of the latest outrage belongs to a particular caste, one that can mobilise protests on that basis, but because a state that was once the cradle of the northern plains’ civilisation cannot be allowed to wallow in this mire indefinitely. A god renowned for his chivalry must be cringing at the prospect of a temple being built in his name in a state whose men have clearly trashed his ideals.