Congressional leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of not speaking after the gang rape of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in the Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh in September.
While interacting with the media in Punjab’s Patiala, Gandhi said he visited the victim’s family last week because he wanted them to know that they were not alone in seeking justice for his daughter. He said that he told the woman’s family that he was not only there for them, but also for his daughter and also for “thousands of women in the country who face rebellious behavior every day, thousands of women who are raped in a day”.
Mocking Modi, the congressional leader said: “However, it is interesting that the woman was raped and murdered and that the entire UP administration targeted her family, but the Prime Minister has not said a word on the matter.”
Prime Minister Modi had previously spoken with the Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, seeking the strictest punishment for the guilty. “The Honorable Prime Minister Narendra Modi told me about the incident and ordered that the strictest punishment be imposed against the accused,” Adityanath had written on Twitter in Hindi.
Gandhi, along with a team of congressional leaders and his sister, and the party’s UP Secretary General Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, met with relatives of the woman on Saturday, who died in a hospital in Delhi just days after the assault. The woman was cremated the next day by UP Police at 2:30 am, even as her family protested. They were later locked inside their home. The aggrieved relatives claimed that they could not even see their daughter’s face before her body was burned with gasoline. The congressional team stayed with the family for over an hour and assured them of their support.
“The UP government will not be able to do anything arbitrary as it wants, because now the whole country is standing up to do justice to the daughter of this country,” Gandhi had tweeted after the visit.
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