New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday lashed out at the Centre and the Uttar Pradesh government over the alleged gang-rape of a minor in a moving bus in Noida, and said there was no chance of any accountability being fixed for the police under Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath as this crime too shall have a curtain drawn over it.
The Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said Delhi-NCR has become so unsafe for women that a minor girl was gang-raped for 47 km in a sleeper bus from Greater Noida to Delhi.
It’s astonishing that neither the entire Delhi police nor the Noida police had the slightest inkling of it, Gandhi said in a post in Hindi on X.
“This bus crossed the Noida-Greater Noida Expressway, Delhi’s Ring Road, the border — all of it — without being stopped even once at a single checkpoint. Curtains were drawn over the bus seats so no one could see what was happening inside. And the perpetrators had no fear of the administration whatsoever,” he said.
Even after so many years since the ‘Nirbhaya’ case, after so many such incidents, why are the rules for checking and monitoring such buses still not being followed, Gandhi asked.
“Those curtains weren’t just drawn on that one bus – it is the result of curtains being drawn year after year by the government over the administration’s failures, leaving women unable even to take a safe journey in the country’s capital,” the former Congress chief said.
How many more women and girls will have to endure this before the central and state governments finally fix this system, Gandhi asked.
“Will there be any accountability for the Delhi Police under Amit Shah, or the UP Police under Adityanath? Not a chance – this crime, too, will just have a curtain drawn over it,” he said.
A 16-year-old girl, who boarded a sleeper bus in Greater Noida on a rainy night on August 4, was allegedly gang-raped by its conductor and driver and abandoned near Kashmere Gate, more than 40 km away in Old Delhi, police said.
The two accused have been arrested, they said, adding that the bus was on the move when the girl was raped.
The crime brought back painful memories of the 2012 gang-rape and murder in Delhi known as the Nirbhaya case.
Upset after being scolded by her mother, the girl from Mainpuri in Uttar Pradesh left home and boarded a bus for Noida Sector 63, where her cousin lives, police said.
She mistakenly got off at Pari Chowk in Greater Noida amid heavy rain around 9 pm, the Class 11 student told police.
Standing in pouring rain, the girl realised that she was still about 25 km away from her cousin’s place. As she searched for transport to reach there, a bus stopped near her.
According to police, the conductor allegedly told her that they were headed to Sector 63 and would drop her off there. Trusting his words, the girl boarded the bus.
The bus, however, was not on regular passenger service that night.
According to investigators and the travel company that operated the bus, it had been taken to a workshop at Surajpur in Greater Noida for repairs after developing a technical fault.
The two accused picked up the bus from the workshop around 5 pm and began their journey around 9 pm.
They travelled from Surajpur to Pari Chowk, where they picked up the girl on the pretext of giving her a lift, before proceeding towards Kashmere Gate. En route, they gang-raped the girl, she alleged in her complaint.
The girl was abandoned at Kashmere Gate, from where she managed to take an auto-rickshaw to the police station.
In a video statement, DCP (North) Niharika Bhatt said that without going into any jurisdiction issue, Delhi Police registered an FIR and launched a search to arrest the accused.
