Chinmayanand Sexual Harassment Case: Delhi Students Stage Protest Over Arrest of Victim

One of the protesters alleged that the police was trying to protect Chinmayanad.

New Delhi: Students from various colleges in the national capital, mainly women students undertaking gender studies, on Sunday staged a protest at Jantar Mantar against the arrest of Shajahanpur student who had accused Union Minister Swami Chinmayayand of rape.

Talking to Indian Express, protesters said that the “accused is being protected while the victim is being victimised in the case”.

Another person told the leading news daily that the entire focus is being shifted on the extortion rather than the rape, calling it “cheap politics”.

One of the protesters alleged that the police was trying to protect Chinmayanad. The other told the Indian Express that the “student’s arrest puts a question mark on the case itself”.

The law student, who studied at a Shahjahanpur college run by his ashram, was arrested on September 25, on extortion charges and is in jail presently. The woman was booked for extortion based on a complaint registered by Chinmayanand’s lawyer that she and three others were blackmailing the 72-year-old politician and demanding money from him.

On September 21, the SIT had booked the woman under Indian Penal Code sections 385 (extortion), 506 (criminal intimidation), 201(disappearance of evidence), 35 (criminal act done with a criminal knowledge or intention) and 67 of the Information Technology Act on charges of causing the disappearance of evidence.

Notably, the 23-year-old postgraduate law student has alleged that she was raped repeatedly and “physically exploited” for a year by the BJP leader, whose organization runs several colleges in Shahjahanpur.

This is the second such case involving a BJP leader to have been reported from Uttar Pradesh in recent days, after the Unnao case.