A 45-year-old woman was dragged out of her house, partially stripped naked, hoisted onto a donkey and paraded through a village in northern India on Saturday after members of a village community accused her of killing her nephew who had died a week earlier, police said Monday.
The accusation was initially taken to the village council in Rajasthan by the nephew's family, Times of India reported.
On Nov. 2, nephew Vardi Singh died in Thurawad village. The circumstances of the 45-year-old man's death "are not known because the villagers cremated his body and didn't inform the police," said SP, Rajsamand, Sweta Dhankar.
Three days after his funeral was held, his wife and some other relatives lodged complaints both to the police and the village council that the aunt had murdered Singh.
After a council meeting was held and the shocking punishment issued against the suspected woman, members of the village blackened her face with coal dust and shaved her head before forcibly parading her through the village, additional superintendent of police Sudhir Joshi said.
"The woman aged around 40 years was in her house when some villagers stormed into the house and pulled her out on Saturday evening," Joshi told Agence France-Presse.
"They cut her hair, blackened her face and stripped her half naked. Then they mounted her on a donkey and paraded her in the village for ten minutes," he continued. "The cruel punishment was meted out to the woman just on a suspicion."
Following the incident, the victim's husband lodged an FIR on Sunday and 39 people were arrested, nine of them from the victim's family.
It was "completely illegal" for the panchayat to hand down such a punishment, Rajasthan's principal secretary for rural development, Shreemat Pandey, told the BBC News.
For the time being, the victim has been shifted to a shelter home where she is being counseled, senior police officers said.
"It's a shameful incident that a woman was treated so badly on orders from the village council," Dhankhad said.
"Initially, she was even afraid to talk about what had happened to her but after the police and officials from the social welfare department arrived, she was able to feel a little safe and narrate her ordeal."
Councils made up of village elders, usually known as "khap panchayats", are common in rural parts of India, especially in the north, where they are often accused of dispensing "Taliban-style justice," according to AFP.
Their diktats are often unconstitutional and illegal, but they continue to hold sway with rules seen as regressive by women's rights activists.
"Most of these incidents of public shaming take place in remote villages and the victims, almost always from economically and socially disadvantaged sections, have no alternative but to continue to live in the communities where they were humiliated," BBC News reported.
