The Bihar Police has booked six persons for the gangrape and murder of a Dalit teenager, reported The Indian Express on Thursday. This came after the minor girl’s mutilated body was found near a pond in a village in the Muzaffarpur district on Tuesday morning.

The incident has sparked a political controversy in Bihar with the Opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal and Bahujan Samaj Party demanding action against those responsible.

The police said that the girl’s parents are daily wage labourers. In a complaint, the girl’s mother alleged that a man named Sanjay Rai, along with some associates, broke into their home on Sunday and kidnapped her daughter.

Despite her husband and son being at home, they were unable to stop the abduction as Rai and his associates were armed, said the mother.

The complaint, registered at a police station in Paroo village, identifies Rai as a resident of the area. He is absconding.

“Rai had been torturing us because we are Dalits and Rai comes from an influential Yadav family,” the mother’s complaint said.

“Five persons, including a person called Sanjay Rai, abducted my daughter on Sunday night threatening to rape her,” The Telegraph quoted the girl’s mother as saying. “We could do nothing out of fear. We found her body next morning in a pond outside our village.”

Rai and five unidentified individuals have been charged with gangrape (Section 70) and murder (Section 103) under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, in addition to sections of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.

Muzaffarpur Senior Superintendent of Police Rakesh Kumar said that the girl’s postmortem report was pending and that the act of rape had not yet been confirmed.

“Evidence of wounds from a sharp weapon were found on the back of the neck, head and palm of the deceased,” he said. “Evidence has been collected from the spot by the FSL [forensic science laboratory] team and dog squad. A scabbard has been recovered.”

The victim’s father said that Rai had sought to marry his daughter.

“We have been tortured by the Yadavs under one pretext or the other,” The Indian Express quoted him as saying. “Several of us would work for them. Of late, Sanjay Rai had been pressuring us to marry off my minor daughter to him. Terrified, she dropped out of school.”

The first information report notes that the family was threatened for turning down Rai’s proposal. “How could we have married my teenage daughter to a 45-year-old man?” the complainant is quoted as saying in the report.

“The horrific incident is proof of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar losing grip,” said Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav. “Murders, rapes and other serious crimes have become the order of the day.”

Bahujan Samaj Party chief and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati pointed out another recent incident in which a Dalit girl was raped in Bihar’s Madhubani district.

“Recently in Bihar, Kamlesh Yadav and his companions gang-raped an 18-year-old Dalit girl of Madhubani district and a few days later, Sanjay Rai (Yadav) and his companions gang-raped and brutally murdered a 14-year-old Dalit girl in Muzaffarpur district,” she said on X.