An FIR has been registered in Delhi against former Uttarakhand minister Harak Singh Rawat on charges of rape. The 32-year-old woman who filed the complaint on Friday night alleged that he sexually abused her when she went to meet him at his house in the capital. An aide of the ex-state agriculture minister, however, claimed that the charges were politically motivated, NDTV reported.
Rawat has faced such allegations earlier. He was booked for allegedly molesting a 30-year-old woman in 2014 when she had gone to meet him for a job.
He was the agriculture minister in Vijay Bahuguna's state Cabinet. He continued in the post after Bahuguna was succeeded by Harish Rawat. He was one of the nine Congress MLAs who had rebelled against the Uttarakhand chief minister in May this year, after which he was expelled from the party. He then joined the Bharatiya Janata Party.
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