A leader of Bihar’s ruling BJP has been accused of sexually harassing a woman after taking objectionable photographs of her and then trying to set her afire when she insisted on pursuing a case she had filed against him in a court.
Sumati (name changed), a divorcee, told police officials visiting her at the hospital that Kamalesh Prasad alias Pappu, in-charge of the north Bihar region of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, attacked her on December 11, but Pappu denied the charges as “baseless and fabricated”.
The ordeals of Sumati, currently undergoing treatment for her burn injuries at Sadar Hospital in Muzaffarpur, revived unsettling memories of a BJP legislator in Bihar whose alleged sexual harassment of a schoolteacher had led to his murder at her hands in 2011.
According to Sumati, Pappu and his men tracked her down in the CJM’s court complex in Muzaffarpur, where she was inquiring about the status of her case against him. She ran away from the court and rushed to her sister’s house, but the men caught hold of her before she could reach and set her afire after pouring kerosene on her following heated arguments. She said she managed to escape and reached the hospital.