New Delhi: Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) chief Swati Maliwal has written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking stronger laws and policies to restrict the remission and paroles of rape convicts.
She cited the Bilkis Bano rape case and Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim and said that they must be sent back to jail.
During the 2002 Gujarat riots, five-months pregnant Bilkis Bano was gang-raped by 11 men and her 3-year-old daughter’s head was smashed with a stone. Fourteen members of her family are killed before her eyes.
On August 15, 2022, the 11 men convicted and sentenced to double life imprisonment for the gang-rape of Bilkis Bano and the murder of her 3-year-old child walked free from Gujarat’s Godhra jail, with the state government claiming they had been set free due to “good conduct” after serving more than 14 years in jail. The decision was condemned by the Opposition parties, activists, political analysts, and journalists.
Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh is serving a 20-year jail term in a prison in Rohtak for raping two women disciples at his ashram in Sirsa. He is out on parole for a period of 40 days.
Prior to that, he was granted three weeks’ furlough in February. He was convicted by a special CBI court in Panchkula in August 2017. In 2019, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh and three others were pronounced guilty in the case of a journalist’s murder.
In 2002, a journalist, Ramchandra Chhatrapati, was shot — and later succumbed to his injuries — after his newspaper, Poora Sach, published an anonymous letter about the sexual exploitation of women by Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh at the Dera Sacha Sauda headquarters. Web Desk
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