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Cabinet urged to look into report on Rajani's suicide

Special Correspondent

M.A. Kuttappan wants criminal action against SFI-DYFI leaders

KOCHI: Former Minister M.A. Kuttappan wants the new Government to consider the Khalid Commission's report on the July 22, 2004 suicide of engineering student Rajani S. Anand at the very first meeting of the Cabinet.

Action-taken report

He also wanted the Government to present an action-taken report on the commission's findings at the first meeting of the Assembly Dr. Kuttappan told a conference here on Wednesday that he, who was the SC-ST Welfare Minister at the time, was the one who had been abused the most in connection with the Dalit girl's death. The SFI and the DYFI had launched a vilification campaign against him.

They had spread the canard that he had cast aspersions on the girl's character and that he had called for a virginity test of her body.

"I had never made any such comments," he said. "I was wrongfully drawn into the row."

The Khalid Commission, appointed by the UDF Government to probe the reasons for the girl's suicide by jumping down from a seven-storey Housing Board building in the capital, found that neither the bank that had denied her an education loan nor the engineering college at Adoor where she had studied were responsible for the suicide.

At the time, the girl was supposed to have ended her life as she could not pay her dues to the college.

Dr. Kuttappan said the SFI-DYFI had run a sustained campaign over the suicide and used the incident as a stick to beat the UDF Government.

The girl was projected as a victim of self-financing colleges' greed for money and banks' cruel denial of loans to needy students.

Public property destroyed

He said that in the vandalism during the strikes and agitations by Left organisations, public property had been extensively destroyed and a large number of private and public vehicles were damaged.

In the light of the Khalid Commission report, Dr. Kuttapapn wants civil and criminal prosecutions launched against leaders of SFI-DYFI for destroying public property.

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