Unnao crash horror: A feeling of disgust

Now a young woman who has suffered extreme personal violence at the hands of a section of the political class, the teenager from Unnao in UP, who in 2017 became the victim of an alleged sexual assault by BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, is battling for her life in a hospital along with her lawyer after the car in which they were travelling met with a serious accident with a truck on Sunday.

The matter has gained nationwide attention on account of the antecedents and dubious reputation of the MLA in question, the horrific circumstances attending the alleged rape case, and the initial bluster of the alleged culprit and seemingly casual approach toward the matter by UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath.

The story has left a feeling of disgust all around and is yet another pointer to the miserable state of law and order in UP in the Yogi raj. On Monday, it rocked the Rajya Sabha.

In Lucknow, some BJP leaders too expressed their sympathy for the victim, worrying that the party’s damaged reputation due to the CM’s lackadaisical attitude toward crime, especially against the weaker sections, women and the minorities, could boomerang politically. This newspaper has earlier argued for a change of CM in India’s largest state.

The circumstances of the collision of the truck in question with the vehicle in which the victim, several members of her family, and her lawyer were travelling, have raised suspicion all around. If she does not survive, the criminal case against the dubious MLA could suffer an irretrievable setback, and this factor appears to be the apparent motive for the truck and car crash, the exact details of which are in the process of being established.

One of the two aunts of the victim killed in Sunday’s crash is a crucial witness in the rape case. She is the one to whom the then teenager first narrated her horror story right after the alleged sexual assault incident in the MLA’s house. With this aunt now dead, the victim’s case in the trial, which has still not opened although two years have gone by, is likely to suffer grievously. And if the victim herself does not recover from her critical condition, the MLA against whom the case was filed will most probably walk free, even if it’s with his head hung low.

To place matters in perspective about criminality in the Yogi raj, when the teenager’s father had gone to the police to complain against the MLA’s alleged rape of his daughter, he was assaulted so badly in police custody that he died. The lone witness to this ghastly crime was also found dead subsequently, raising very serious questions about law enforcers protecting criminal politicians as the government failed to do its duty with any purposefulness.