Demanding that the former Haryana Director-General of Police S.P.S. Rathore, who was recently sentenced for molesting a 14-year-old girl in August 1990, and those who shielded him must be imprisoned, father of the victim urged that the case be reopened.
Speaking to journalists, here on Sunday, he recalled with horror the sequence of events which led to his daughter’s suicide.
“After getting my daughter expelled from the school, he started to harass my son, who was picked up by police on false charges, beaten and thrown on the road unconscious. My son was not allowed to attend his sister’s final rites.”
With tears in his eyes he said that his daughter ended her life as she blamed herself for the torture the family suffered. But Mr. Rathore was not charged for abetment to suicide, he said.
Blaming the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Anand Prakash, one of the complainants in the case, said the agency faltered by not booking Mr. Rathore under section 306 of the IPC.
“The CBI should have included the case under section 306 for abetment to suicide. Had he been booked for abetment, the cases of harassment of the victim’s family would have also come to light,” he added.
Advocate Pankaj Bhardwaj, counsel for Anand Prakash, said despite providing the CBI with detailed information regarding Mr. Rathore’s attempts to tamper with the report of the cause of death and his frequent threats and harassments, the agency did not probe anything other than the molestation charge. “The CBI should have included the case under section 306 for abetment to suicide. They should have appealed to the Supreme Court for filing under this section,” he said.
PIL filed
Meanwhile, a Chandigarh based lawyer and human right’s activist, Ranjan Lakhanpal, has filed a Public Interest Litigation petition in the 1990 molestation case, “We will revisit the entire chronology of events, from the first incident to each act of harassment and torture so that Mr. Rathore, his accomplices and his political patronage can be traced and brought to book,” he said.
Father of the victim along with the complainants in case, Anand and Madhu Prakash, demanded that Mr. Rathore’s service medals be taken away from him. His pension should be stopped and his bail cancelled. “No one should see him smile, like he did when he came out of the courts that day. That smile has to go,” the victim’s father said.
