Rahul Gandhi leads candle march at India Gate to protest gang-rape incidents

Congress president Rahul Gandhi, his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra along with other party leaders, took out a candle march at India Gate to demand justice for Unnao and Kathua rape victims on Thursday night.

Earlier in the day, the Uttar Pradesh Police has handed over the Unnao rape case, in which Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar is the prime accused, to the CBI.

The state police, earlier in the day, had registered a case against the BJP lawmaker from Unnao after a report was submitted by the Special Investigation Team (SIT).

After the report was published and shown in media, departmental proceeding were initiated against three doctors, including Dr DK Dwivedi and Dr Prashant Upadhyay for the negligence of duty.

“The doctors showed laxity in giving proper medical care to the victim's father, both prior to judicial custody and on referral from jail to the district hospital while in judicial custody,” an official report read.

The district police chief has also suspended Safipur Circle Officer Kunwar Bahadur Singh for not properly handling the case in spite of repeated complaints by the victim and her family members.

Late Wednesday, the BJP lawmaker was seen outside Lucknow senior superintendent of police (SSP)’s residence. He then told the media said that he was not on the run.

Unnao legislator Sengar is accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in June 2017. The family since then had been making attempts to lodge a complaint against him.

In the Kathua incident,  earlier in the day, Union Minister VK Singh has called for justice to the eight-year-old gang-rape victim. Singh took to Twitter on Thursday to express anguish over the incident that took place in J&K's Kathua and wrote that Asifa, the rape victim, will not be denied justice.

“We have failed Asifa as humans. But she will not be denied justice,” Singh tweeted. Singh rose in support of Asifa soon after Congress president Rahul Gandhi termed the incident "crime against humanity" and tweeted, “How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil?”
Further targeting the BJP, Gandhi wrote, “What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?”

The minor from Bakherwal nomads community was abducted from near her house on January 10. Her body was recovered on January 17.
During the course of the investigation, police learnt that she was kept sedated, hungry and gang-raped multiple times for several days before being strangulated to death. Her perpetrators, to ensure she was dead, crushed her head with a boulder.

According to police records, the minor was raped by at least eight people before being killed. One of the perpetrators, a police officer, asked her killers to wait for while so that he could “satisfy his lust.”  The victim’s perpetrators had also invited a minor to “satisfy his lust” from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh.

Two BJP ministers of Jammu and Kashmir had participated in a rally called by a fringe group, Hindu Ekta Manch, in support of the girl’s alleged perpetrators.