Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of not speaking out after the gang-rape of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras district in September.
While interacting with the media in Punjab’s Patiala, Gandhi said he paid a visit to the family of the victim last week because he wanted them to know that they were not alone in seeking justice for their daughter. He said he told the woman’s family that he was not only there for them but their daughter and also for “lakhs of women in the country who face unruly behaviour every day, thousands of women who are raped in a day.”
Taking a jibe at Modi, the Congress leader said, “It is, however, interesting that the woman was raped and murdered and the entire UP administration targeted her family but the Prime Minister hasn’t said a word on the issue.”
PM Modi had earlier spoken with chief minister Yogi Adityanath seeking the strictest punishment for culprits. “Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken to me on the incident and directed that strictest punishment be taken against the accused,” Adityanath had written on Twitter in Hindi.
Gandhi along with a team of Congress leaders and his sister and the party’s UP general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Saturday met the family members of the woman, who died at a hospital in Delhi a few days after the assault. The woman was cremated the next day by the UP Police at 2:30 am even as her family protested. They were then locked inside their house. The aggrieved relatives alleged that they couldn’t even see their daughter’s face before her body was burnt with petrol. The Congress team stayed with the family for over an hour and assured them of support.
“The UP government will not be able to do anything arbitrary as it wants, because now the whole country is standing to bring justice to the daughter of this country,” Gandhi had tweeted after the visit.
