On Monday, the daughter of the Unnao rape case convict, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, wrote an open letter to him stating that her family are exhausted, frightened with gradually fading faith as their legal battle against him carries on after eight years.
The letter by Ishita Sengar was on a day when the highest court stopped a decision of a Delhi High Court to stay the life sentence of her father and expel BJP MLA, a leader who raped a minor who had visited his home in 2017 to secure a job under his leadership. After the case has wound its way, her father died one year later in police custody, and two of her family members were killed in a car crash in 2019.
The daughter of the former MLA, in a post on X, stated that her family had been waiting patiently over eight years as they had faith in the Constitution and thought that justice in this country would not be affected by noisy outcries, hash-tags, or outraged citizens. Ishita Sengar also included that the label of daughter of BJP MLA apparently denies her dignity or even the right to speak. I have heard a million times on social media that I ought to be raped, murdered or even punished just because I exist. This hatred is not abstract. It is daily. It is relentless. And it destroys something in you,” she said.
Ishita Sengar has claimed she was abused, mocked and dehumanised daily and has been emptied financially, emotionally and physically due to their choice of silence. Nobody paid them any attention, she said, not because the facts were bad ones. Not because there was not evidence present. But since our truth was inconvenient.
She has expressed that beyond injustice, she is now terrified by a fear so voluble that not a single judge, journalist, institutions or every citizen are influenced to remain quiet.
A vacancy bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices JK Maheshwari and Augustine George Masih also gave notice to Kuldeep Sengar requesting his response of the Central Bureau of Investigation plea against the order of the High Court. It claimed that the old lawmaker is not to be released on custody. It too showed concern in the way the High Court was interpreting the meaning of the term public servant in Section 5 of the POCSO Act in that, with such an interpretation the law might create an anomalous situation of excluding elected lawmakers, but may include lower-level officials.
Following the decision of the court of law, the daughter of Kuldeep Sengar, Aishwarya Sengar, who is also his defence team member, stated that the defence had no right to proceed with the arguments on the merits. Even today we could not begin debating on the merits of the case, her statement has shifted and switched several times and according to her timing, she began at 2 pm, and then at 6 pm and then at last at 8 pm. AIIMS medical board discovered that she was above 18. According to the CDR records, I was not on site when the alleged incident took place. It has also been recorded that she came herself on a call during the supposed period of the incident, she said.
Eight years of my struggle with the justice were in vain, maybe the sufferings of me and my relatives are insignificant. Our dignity, our peace and even our basic right to be heard have been taken away. Still, I hope for justice. I would like to urge the media not to spread any misinformation, she told the media.
In particularly; the jail term of Kuldeep Sengar, who had been awarded life imprisonment in the Unnao rape case was suspended by the High Court on the basis that the accused already had a jail sentence of seven years and five months of jail time. The High Court suspended his sentence pending the time his appeal was debating his conviction and sentence on the rape case. The case has been appealed against by him over a trial court ruling in December 2019.
An LK Advani Twist In Supreme Court Hearing On Unnao Rape Convict’s Bail
On Monday, the Supreme Court intervened to prevent the release of one-time Uttar Pradesh MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who had been granted the release on bail under an order issued in 2017 by the Delhi High Court that had suspended his life imprisonment sentence in an rape case that had occurred in 2017. The action taken by the top court has opened an issue that the elected lawmaker can be considered a public servant by Protection of Children as a Sexual offences (POCSO) Act.
These actions are based on an appeal by the CBI to the Supreme Court which has criticized the reasoning used by the High Court as being flawed in terms of the law. The big-time of the CBI struggle was that it relied on a Supreme Court ruling of an LK Advani vs CBI case in 1997 that touched on corruption charges against senior political leaders and made it clear within the law of how MPs and MLAs should be treated under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.
The CBI appealed against the order of the High Court in the Supreme Court and argued that the rationale used was unlawful.
The CBI used the Supreme court judgment of 1997 on the case LK Advani vs CBI which arose due to corruption claims of high-ranking political leaders such as Advani in its petition. CBI had registered cases against it on the basis of Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 where illegal money was paid to the politicians as a consideration to get favour in the government.
One of the legal questions in such a case was whether or not elected representatives: MPs and MLAs could be reviewed as public servants to be protected by the law against corruption. The Supreme Court responded affirmatively to this question and believed that elected representative members of the populace are squarely within the bracket of the public servants in the Prevention of Corruption Act.
The CBI now states that since the legislators are capable of being treated like a servant of the people when it comes to crimes like corruption, the same aspect should be applied in the same or rather more weight in cases such as the sexual offences committed against kids.
The agency claims that the High Court applied the POCSO Act in too narrow a way and did not consider a binding Supreme Court precedent. It cautioned that without including the definition of the term of public servants in the definition of POCSO, there would be no need of the law.
An order of the Delhi High Court granting bail to Sengar was put on hold by a vacation bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant with Justice JK Maheshwari and Augustine George Masih as associates. The court posted it on the former BJP MLA and provided him four weeks in which he was to answer to the CBI petition.
The case is traced back to 2017, when a teenager, of the Unnao district, claimed that she was raped by Kuldeep Sengar, who was the incumbent MLA in the Bangarmau constituency. It also entailed the killing of a father to the survivor who was in custody, of which Sengar was also convicted separately.
Sengar was eventually sentenced by the trial court to life imprisonment in rape.
The Delhi High court suspended the life sentence of Sengar and gave him bail earlier this week, before the hearing of his appeal against the trial court verdict. Justice Subramonium Prasad and Justice Harish Vaidyanathan held the view that Sengar was an MLA and merely because of that fact, did not qualify as a public servant under the POCSO Act.
The High Court decided that the definition of a public servant in POCSO does not state specifically that the MLAs are included. It based that on the fact that Sengar was not to be subjected to what it termed as the higher standards of POCSO under crimes perpetrated by a state servant or officer of trust.
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