Friday, September 27, 2019

The perks of power in India.

"The Unnao rape survivor was discharged on Wednesday from the AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences) where she was admitted after she met with an accident, sources said." She is said to have been kidnapped in 2017 and raped by Kuldeep Singh Sengar, a 4 time member of the legislative assembly in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and belonged to the BJP. He has since been expelled from the BJP. Earlier he had been expelled from the Congress, the BSP and the SP. A First Information Report (FIR) was filed with the police who arrested the father of the victim. He was assaulted by Sengar's men, possibly for having the temerity of filing a police complaint, and died of his injuries in prison. It was only when the woman tried to immolate herself in front of the residence of the Chief Minister of UP that the media got alerted about the events and Sengar was arrested in response to the nationwide outrage that followed. Even better was to follow. In July, "A car in which the survivor of Unnao rape case, her family and lawyer were travelling was hit by a an over-speeding truck in Rae Bareli on Sunday, killing two members while leaving her and the advocate critically injured, police said." A 12-member team from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) found that the truck was on the wrong side of the road and the car hit it from behind. If the truck was on the wrong side of the road it was obviously going in the opposite direction and so the car could not possibly hit it from behind. However, now the CBI has decided that the woman and her family are facing "the highest level of threat". In another case a 23 year-old law student accused Swami Chinmayanand of raping her for over a year. Swami Chinmayanand was born Krishna Pal Singh and was elected to the Lok Sabha from UP and was a minister in the previous BJP government in 1999. The change is name is to show that he had become a religious man. In Sengar's case the father was arrested by the police after being beaten up, while in this case the woman herself and three of her friends have been arrested on a charge of trying to extort money from Chinmayanand on false charges. She was arrested so quickly that her lawyer had no time to appeal for bail which will be heard on 30 September. Earlier this year a 35-year old married woman accused the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi of inappropriate sexual behavior. The CJI refused to recuse himself from the case and set up an in-house committee to investigate the charges. Naturally, the woman refused to have anything to do with the committee and the case fizzled out. In Goa, a member of the Congress accused of raping a minor joined the BJP and was rewarded when his wife was made a minister. "Although India accounted for 18% of the global population in 2016, a study published in the Lancet Public Health journal showed that Indians accounted for 37% of the global suicide deaths among women." Are these events related?

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