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An unelected all male village council in an Indian village, has ordered that two ladies, 23-year-old Meenakshi Kumari and her 15-year-old sister, be raped by several men each as punishment their brother ran off with a married woman. Sometimes times ago, their brother was said to have been having hot romance with a married woman in their village. The two of them had been seeing secretly despite then fact that the woman was living with her husband. Things got to a head when the two of them decided to elope.

This had angered the husband of the woman and the community. They claimed they had warned the two love birds to desist prior to their elopement, but they had turned deaf ears to all warnings. Finally,they decided to elope. This has put the sisters of the randy brother into real big mess as they are now the ones left to pay for their brother's misdeeds. The man had left 2 sisters behind. Judgement chairs by the men in the community have decided to punish the two sisters left behind by the man.

Some are however of the opinion that the idea is not actually to rape the sisters, but to force their brother to return to the village with the woman he had eloped with. The expectation is that he would be forced to come back when he heard the news.

In addition to their sentence, the two sisters would also be paraded naked round the community with blackened faces, an act of extreme humiliation in that country. This has been identified as one of the extreme judgements or punishments ever reserved for anyone in that community. The judgement is however determined by whether or not their brother returns to the community with the woman. If he brings back the woman before the sentence is carried out, his sisters would be spared the shame and agony.

The strange punishment was condemned by Amnesty International which has launched a petition calling on India's authorities to intervene immediately and protect the two sisters, while urging concerned members of the public all over the world to sign up a petition to save the girls and their family who have fled their village in the Baghpat district, just outside of Delhi.

According to reports in Indian media, the sisters' brother, Ravi, fell in love with a girl from the Jat caste, a higher social caste than Ravi and his family, who are Dalit, once known as the 'untouchables', who are at the bottom of India's caste system.

The Jat woman's family married her off to someone else in February but she later escaped and eloped with Ravi in March.

As punishment, on July 31, a village council decided that Ravi's sisters should be raped to avenge his actions of daring to elope with a woman from a higher social status, who is also married. Since the family fled their village their home has been ransacked.

Sumit Kumar, another brother of Meenakshi, told Amnesty that members of the Jat caste were powerful members of the village council, saying: the Jat decision is final.