Woman assault in K’taka: Five-member BJP fact-finding team arrives at Belagavi

PTI, Dec 16, 2023, 10:41 AM IST

The five-member fact-finding team of BJP on Saturday reached here to collect firsthand information into the matter where a tribal woman was assaulted and paraded naked.

A delegation of MPs comprising Aparajita Sarangi, Sunita Duggal, Ranjeeta Koli, Locket Chatterjee and BJP national secretary Asha Lakra arrived at the Belagavi airport in the morning.

The team will not only meet the victim and console her, but will also get detailed information about the incident.

The woman was also tied to a pole after her son eloped with a girl from the same community at Vantamuri village in Belagavi on December 11.

Police have arrested eight people while eight others are still at large.

The Karnataka High Court has taken up the case on its own. It also termed the incident worse than what had happened to Draupadi during Mahabharata, as Lord Krishna came to her rescue, but in the Belagavi incident, no one came to help the victim.

The BJP will also be staging statewide demonstrations in all the districts condemning the incident.

BJP president J P Nadda and Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman have also condemned the assault. In a statement, Nadda said such henious crimes especially against women, are happening at regular intervals ever since the Congress government has come to power in Karnataka. This also exposes the irresponsible behaviour of Congress governments everywhere in the country in tackling such crimes.

In a post of ‘X’, Sitharaman said: ”In @INCIndia there is no ‘nyay’ (Justice) for the SCs and STs. The recent incident in Belagavi, Karnataka falls in the same category as those repeated atrocities against the Dalits seen till recently in Congress-ruled Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. For Congress the downtrodden are just a votebank.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah slammed Nadda for attempting to gain political mileage out of the Belagavi incident.

In a strongly worded statement, the chief minister said the BJP’s rule in Karnataka witnessed multiple instances of violence against women, but Nadda had forgotten this to politically target the Congress government. Unfortunately, he is using a recent incident of violence against a woman in Belagavi for politics, he charged.