Eight-month-old baby raped in Delhi India

The rape of an eight-month-old baby girl, allegedly by her cousin, has renewed widespread outrage in India over sexual assault. The girl is in a critical but stable condition in a local hospital in Delhi, local media reported. Police said her 28-year-old cousin had been arrested. Swati Maliwal, chair of the Delhi Commission for Women, who visited the girl in hospital on Monday, said she had suffered "inhuman injuries" to her internal organs. She said the infant had to undergo a three-hour operation. In a tweet in Hindi, Ms Maliwal asked: "Who is responsible? The entire system has been neutered. Nobody makes a difference. When will [it] change?" In a direct message to the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, she said "stricter laws and more police resources" were needed to protect girls in the country. She added: "What to do? How can Delhi sleep today when 8 month baby has been brutally raped in Capital? "Have we become so insensitive or we have simply accepted this as our fate?" Fury over sexual assault in India has been mounting after the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a bus in Delhi in 2012. Widespread demonstrations led the government to introduce tougher punishments for rape, including the death penalty. In 2016, police received nearly 39,000 rape complaints, up 12.4 per cent from the previous year. In the same year, 19,765 cases of child rape were registered in India, an increase of 82 per cent from the year before, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.