A pair of Latvian sisters traveled to India in search of hope. It ended in tragedy.

On April 20, 2018, I awoke to the news that 32-year-old Liga Skroname had been found drugged, raped and beheaded in the state of Kerala, India. Just two months prior, I had shared a room with her and her sister, Ilze, at the Amritapuri ashram.

I first arrived in India in December 2019 as a 21-year-old looking for adventure after draining my savings account and buying a roundtrip ticket to New Delhi. I spent my time taking in the sights, scents, and sounds of a place so vastly different from my home of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

However, Liga and Ilze had come to the country in search of something much more important — hope.

Our paths first crossed in the village of Parayakadavu, in the southwest state of Kerala. The Amritapuri ashram is home to Mata Amritanandamayi, also known as “Amma.” The 66-year-old woman is a spiritual leader for Indian Hindus revered as the “hugging saint” by her followers. She is said to have comforted more than 34 million people in her lifetime.

Liga and Ilze were among the hundreds of people in line waiting to receive one of Amritanandamayi’s hugs. The Latvian sisters were hoping Amritanandamayi could help Liga find comfort as she struggled with depression.

After a week of sharing a room with the sisters at the ashram, they packed up their belongings and continued their journey to the Dharna Ayurveda Healing Center in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala, where they were optimistic Liga would find the peace she so desperately wanted.

However, that peace never came.

Halfway through her treatment, Liga decided to take a walk where she came upon two suspected drug dealers — Umesh and Usayan — who allegedly drugged, assaulted and killed her.

Word of Liga’s 37-day disappearance made headlines worldwide, even reaching my home country of Argentina. India, declared the most dangerous country in the world for women in 2018, had found its latest victim.

Even now, three and a half years later, the country continues to struggle with increasing crimes against women. In 2020, there were an average of 80 murders and 77 rapes reported daily in India, with most happening in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Yogita Bhayana, an anti-rape activist based in Delhi who founded the organization People Against Rape in India, explained the reason for the number of crimes committed against women: men believe they have a right to a woman’s body and consider the encounter consensual. Bhayana said the women, in turn, “learn to live with the idea that it is okay to be molested, touched and to not speak about it.”

In total, there were 28,000 reported rapes in India in 2020, including the 2020 Hathras gang rape that resulted in the death of a 19-year-old Dalit woman who was attacked while collecting cattle fodder. The woman was initially taken to a hospital with spinal cord damage and her tongue cut off before dying from her injuries. Before the doctor confirmed she was assaulted, police in Hathras called reports of the attack “fake news.”

And 2021 is proving to be an even more dangerous year for women in India, with Delhi reporting a 20% increase in reported rapes with 1,745 reported as of October 31. It’s a trend Ilze would like to see end, but for now she’ll continue her fight to get justice for her sister.

“For the past three and a half years I constantly pushed and never gave up, ” Ilze Skroname said. “If I wouldn’t have had the courage to push this case, she may have never been found.”

When Sulagna Maitra, from West Bengal, was 11 years old she sat at the front of a rickshaw. As the driver began pulling the vehicle, he strategically positioned his elbow to push against her chest.

“At the time, I felt extremely uncomfortable,” she said. “I did not know how to process it, nor did I have the language for it.”

The event, which happened 15 years ago, is still imprinted in Maitra’s mind, and she has avoided sitting in the front of a rickshaw since.

Click here to watch the trailer of "India's Daughter," the documentary that India's government doesn't want you to watch. Photo courtesy: IMDb

The opportunities to commit a crime against a woman in India are high, partly because women are blamed for the rapes. Both at school and at home with their families, women are taught how to avoid men from approaching them. According to Debnath, in school they are not taught the difference between “a good and a bad touch” and they are given superficial seminars about the topic. This eventually leads to what she considers unavoidable: “Eventually some guy is going to walk up to us and think we are his property.”

Maitra, who used to live in Delhi, said that in school safety issues are “brought on women,” that they are taught on how to behave, and are “policed,” for example, by controlling that their uniforms remain below their knees. As a consequence, she bases her daily decisions on how to diminish the currencies of something happening as much as possible.

Raidhani Debnath, a 25-year-old woman from Kolkata, West Bengal, said that every decision she makes is based on safety, ranging from times of day she feels safe to be outdoors to how to get home.

“There has not been one day in my life where I walked outside my house and felt completely safe,” Debnath said.

Gang rape cases, including the Mumbai gang rape in 2014, in which five men raped a 22-year-old photojournalist, and the 2012 Delhi gang rape, where a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern was beaten and raped in a bus by six men, have shocked the world. Cases continue to increase, as have the levels of brutality.

“Every single woman in India has been touched, groped, raped or abused,” Bhayana said. “I claim that, and it is a hypocrisy to not acknowledge it.”

The 2020 documentary “Rape is Consensual: Inside Haryana’s Rape Culture,” produced by The Quint, shows rape as an accepted practice within parts of the population. The film highlights the notion that sex is consensual when a woman turns 14 years old, and that she should not leave the house unless it’s for work. The “honor” of the family also lies upon the woman, which is used as a “costume” to control her and deny her privileges, including agency over her own life.

“The environment thinks it’s okay to rape a woman because of the society, the social fabric, their upbringing and the patriarchal society,” Bhayana said.

On the morning of March 14 Liga woke up with a headache and decided to skip the yoga class she had been taking with her sister for the past three weeks. As Ilze came back from the class, she headed toward the spot where Liga was supposedly meeting her private teacher straight after, but she was nowhere to be found.

“I would never know what was going on in my sister’s head because she would never talk nor get involved in conversations, but when I saw she wasn’t there I knew something was wrong,” Ilze said.

The local police’s response was as expected: “Girl calm down, she’s fine, she’ll be back soon, ” and for the next few days they disregarded the case. It was not until Ilze brought the case to the court and the media that it received the deserved attention; eventually the news reached the eyes of two local boys who were playing at a local small beach and found Liga’s body hanging from a tree, with her head detached, laying on the ground.

Once she was found, the police tried to title it as suicide. And if it weren't for Ilze’s persistence to show proof that the place where Liga was found was only accessible by a private local boat, Liga’s life would have been remembered as such.

With rape considered normal in certain parts of India, and with the institutions failing to address the situation and educate men, women will continue to be exposed to these unthinkable brutalities, which continue to shiver the world.

“We still don’t have the resources to protect women,” Bhayana said. “No woman in India is safe.”