A senior BSP minister and a BSP legislator, in different incidents, have been charged with rape, causing considerable embarrassment to an already beleaguered Mayawati government.
UP minister for rural development Daddu Prasad has been accused of raping Kamla, a 27-year-old woman from Bargadh village in Chitrakoot district.
However, UP chief minister Mayawati has refused to take action against Mr Prasad saying that the allegations against him were fabricated and politically motivated.
The woman who had accused the minister’s personal assistant of sexually exploiting her two days ago, said in a statement before the judicial magistrate in Chitrakoot that the minister had raped her in the Banda Dak bungalow in 2007. She said that the minister and his PA Angad, had even clicked her nude photographs which were later used to blackmail her.
Kamla, who had consumed poison at the SP office when the police refused to register her complaint, told local reporters that she worked at the Sarvodaya Sewa Ashram and it was here that she first met the minister’s PA Angad.
“In 2007, he took me to meet the minister on the pretext of getting me a government job. They offered me dinner after which I fell unconscious and throughout the night, the minister and his PA raped me by turns. Thereafter, they continued to exploit me and I even got pregnant five times in the past four years but was forced to abort,” the woman said.
The minister, however, denied the allegations and said that this was a part of a political conspiracy against him.
In another incident, the BSP MLA from Jalalpur in Shahjahanpur Neeraj Maurya has been accused of raping a woman.
In a statement made before the magistrate, Sakshi Soni, a resident of Maujampur village, claimed that she had been abducted from the fields by three men about a year-and-a-half ago.
The men then took her to the BSP MLA’s bungalow where she was kept in confinement and raped repeatedly by the MLA and his henchmen. She was later shifted to a farmhouse in Haryana and kept drugged most of the time. It was here that she gave birth to a boy who is now 10 months old. She was later abandoned in the farmhouse.