A woman was raped on a footpath in the busy Koyla Phatak area of Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain on Wednesday, The Indian Express reported quoting police officials.
Passersby recorded videos of the crime without intervening to stop the perpetrator, according to the police.
Om Prakash Mishra, Ujjain’s city superintendent of police, said that the woman came to the police station at 3.30 pm on Thursday to complain of rape.
“Immediately a woman officer was called, her story was heard and an FIR [first information report] was registered after informing senior officers,” he added.
In her complaint, the woman accused a man named Lokesh of the crime.
Lokesh was arrested within two hours of the woman’s complaint, the newspaper quoted Mishra as saying. “[He] was brought to the police station and questioned, during which Lokesh admitted to committing the crime,” the police official said.
Lokesh was subsequently presented before a court that remanded him to judicial custody.
Mishra told The Indian Express that a video of the incident recorded by a passerby was taken as evidence in the case.
The newspaper quoted an unidentified police official as alleging that the man “promised to marry the victim, made her drink liquor and then raped her.”
The political row
The incident led to a row between the Congress and the state’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Congress’ Madhya Pradesh chief Jitu Patwari said that the woman was raped in public in Chief Minister Mohan Yadav’s constituency at a time when the BJP has been protesting against the rape and murder of a doctor at a Kolkata hospital in August.
“In Madhya Pradesh, 18 women are raped or face some form of harassment every day,” Patwari claimed. “Boundaries were crossed when in the chief minister’s own constituency, a woman was raped on the footpath.”
Patwari questioned why BJP leaders including Yadav, former Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had not commented on the incident. “There is a ‘jungle raj’ [lawlessness] in Madhya Pradesh,” he said.
State BJP chief VD Sharma accused the Congress of politicising the incident. “The Congress has no issues [with which] to corner the Madhya Pradesh government and that’s why they try to give such a colour to the incident,” he said.
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