Political Parties up in Arms Over Rape Incident

Chennai: All opposition parties in the State today upped their ante against the government over the alleged rape of a second year engineering student inside the main Guindy campus of the Anna University on December 23 night by calling for protests all over the State and accusing the police of leaking the first information report that contained the personal details of the girl and also trying to water down the case.

Though Law Minister S Regupathy clarified that the police has arrested the accused Gnansekeran, who runs a biryani outlet on the pavement outside the university within five hours of receiving the complaint from the girl, the prime opposition parties, leaders of the AIADMK and BJP went hammer and tongs by trying to organize protests and courted arrest.

While AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K Palainswami called for protests to be held in front of all Collectors’ offices on Friday, the party’s organization secretary D Jayakumar was prevented from staging an agitation in front of Anna University where he led a group of 1000 party workers and BJP leader Tamilisai Soundararajan was arrested when she was tried to hold an agitation with her supporters at Valluvar Kottam.

Since the BJP State President K Annamalai alleged that the person arrested by the police had links with the DMK and that he was an office-bearer in the Students’ wing and produced evidence in the form of Facebook posts that have photographs of Gnanasekaran and Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin and Health Minister M Subramanian in the same frame, Regupathy told media persons at the Secretariat that those pictures were taken without the knowledge of the Ministers.

The Minister said that the government would ensure that the culprit was punished and had nothing to hide in the case as the opposition parties were claiming. He refuted the charge of the opposition that the State had turned unsafe for women under the DMK rule and quoted data from the National Crime Record Bureau that said that when the national rape percentage stood at 4.6, it was only 0.7 for Tamil Nadu.

Regupathy said that the nation had seen 1,65,000 crimes against women, as per the 2022 Report, in Tamil Nadu it was a mere 24 and that most of the BJP ruled State had witnessed a very high rate of crimes against women. Denying that the identity of the rape victim was leaked by the police, he said the opposition parties would not succeed in playing politics over the incident as the government was clear in its stand.

Annamalai had asked his party cadre and functionaires to hold protests in front of their homes as the police was not allowing them to gather for agitations.

PMK president Anbumani Ramadoss said revealing the identity of the girl went against the code of conduct for those dealing with the case. Palaniswami and Annamalai, too, said revealing the identity was not proper.,