INDIA arrested Congress party leaders Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi today as they sought to visit a village where a 19-year-old woman was gang-raped and tortured last month, later dying from her injuries.

The arrests come after days in which police have beaten and arrested protesters demonstrating over the rape and killing of two Dalit women.

The second, a 22-year-old from the same state, Uttar Pradesh, was abducted on her way to register for a school and brutally assaulted. Both women died on Tuesday.

Dalits are at the bottom of India’s caste system and the suspected rapists are upper-caste men. Four men have been arrested on suspicion of the first rape and two for the second.

The Dalit political group Bhim Army has held mass protests demanding that the perpetrators are hanged.

The 19-year-old’s family say the police refused to allow them to perform rites over her body and cremated it without letting them take it home.

Mr Gandhi had described the hasty cremation as “abusive and unjust” and was on his way to visit the family when seized by police.

Uttar Pradesh has become “the rape state of India,” Maimoona Mullah of the All-India Democratic Women’s Association, the women’s wing of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), said.

“We do not accept rape culture in the name of new India,” she declared. Uttar Pradesh is ruled by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP.

The CPI-M says that Uttar Pradesh “has become a hotbed of crimes against women with daily incidents of kidnapping, rape and murder,” and that criminals with political patronage can get away with anything in “a jungle raj with goons moving around with impunity.”

Politburo member Brinda Karat condemned the “unwritten code of the [Yogi] Adityanath government – that caste brotherhood with the chief minister grants you special immunity from the law, especially in rape cases.”

She said: “Victims find themselves doubly victimised, their families threatened, witnesses get killed mysteriously in accidents, the list is endless.”

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mr Adityanath, a Hindu monk, is also known for his Islamophobic views, having ordered Muslim schools in the state to supply video evidence that they make pupils sing the Indian national anthem in 2017 and calling for a ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries.