UP woman to SC: Don’t want to go back, bring parents to Delhi

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 30

A woman law student from Uttar Pradesh, who had gone missing after levelling harassment allegations against former Union minister and BJP leader Swami Chinmayanand was found in Rajasthan, was unwilling to go back to her home state, the Supreme Court said today.

After an in-camera interaction in the evening with the woman who was brought to the SC on its orders, a Bench headed by Justice R Banumathi, in an open court hearing, said she wanted to be in Delhi till her parents came here.

The Bench — which also included Justice AS Bopanna — directed the court’s registry to ensure her safe stay for four days in Delhi. It also ordered the Delhi Police Commissioner to ensure safe travel of the woman’s parents from UP’s Shahjahanpur to Delhi to meet her.

The judges said the woman told them she left Shahjahanpur with her three college mates to protect herself and that she would not go back to UP until she met her parents. After meeting her parents, she will decide what to do, they said. The Bench ordered a Delhi Police team to be dispatched to Shahjahanpur at the earliest to safely bring her parents to the Capital and continue providing them security till further orders.

Posting the matter for further hearing on Monday, the Bench said till then the woman will not talk to or meet anyone except her parents.

Earlier during the day, the Bench asked the UP Government to produce her before it after it was told by an UP counsel that she had been found in Rajasthan and was being taken to Shahjahanpur to meet her parents. The court directed the state government to produce the woman before it today itself and accordingly, the UP Police reached the SC around 6.45 pm with the law student.

The SC had taken suo motu cognisance of the matter after a group of lawyers wrote a letter to Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi seeking his intervention.

The Shahjahanpur police had on Tuesday lodged an FIR against Chinmayanand after the student went missing following her allegation in a video clip that he had been harassing her. The woman had also talked about threat to her and her family members’ lives in the video.

Her father had filed a complaint with the police accusing BJP leader Chinmayanand, 72, who heads the Mumukshu ashram, of sexually harassing her, a charge refuted by the BJP leader’s lawyer who claimed it was a “conspiracy” to blackmail him. She is a post-graduate student in one of the colleges run by the ashram.