Shelter home incidents shameful, no culprit will escape action: Rajnath
New Delhi, Aug 7 : Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday told the Lok Sabha that rapes in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh shelter homes are "sad and shameful" and assured that steps would be taken to prevent recurrence of such acts and that no culprit would escape action.
"I direct the ministry concerned to issue advisories to all states so that no such incident is repeated. Running shelter homes can be investigated," Singh assured the opposition.
"Whatever happened in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh is sad and shameful," he said during the Question Hour.
However, there was again an uproar after the Union Minister praised and congratulated Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's government for taking "concrete steps" after the Deoria shelter home crime surfaced.
"He (Adityanath) called a meeting of all the officers and directed them to take strict action. No culprit will escape action The District Planning Officer was suspended and the managers of the shelter home were arrested," Rajnath Singh said.
Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge said: "The issue is being raised in the House consecutively for three days, let us have a parliamentary panel to inspect and submit a report."
Kharge also asked the Speaker to set up a House Committee to probe the incidents.
Opposition parties, including the Congress, Trinamool Congress and Samajwadi Party staged a walkout after the Home Minister's statement, demanding an impartial probe into both Deoria and Muzaffarpur shelter home rapes.
Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said: "These incidents are very unfortunate. All the concerned members should take appropriate action on such incidents in their constituencies. But, don't do politics on the matter."
Samajwadi Party member Dharmendra Yadav said "strict action should be taken against the culprits" and a probe should be initiated. He also said that he does not want to play politics on the issue.
He later said that the Home Minister's act of congratulating Adityanath for his efforts to take action in the Deoria case is "unfortunate and condemnable".
RJD member Jay Prakash Narayan Yadav also spoke on the issue.
Both shelter home horrors sparked a political storm in Parliament after the cases revealed sordid tales of women being abused at these places.
A total of 24 girls were rescued from the shelter home in Deoria late on Sunday after one of them told the police that they were being sexually abused.
Officials told IANS that 18 girls were missing from the privately-run shelter home which earlier got funds from the government. Its affiliation to the Women and Child Welfare Department was cancelled in 2017 after a CBI probe revealed some discrepancies.
At least 34 minor girls were raped at the Muzaffarpur shelter home. The crime came to light in July when the Bihar Social Welfare Department filed an FIR on the basis of a social audit by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.
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Two injuries, one DNF, a DQ as India end messy World Relays campaign
Gaborone (Botswana) (PTI): Amoj Jacob and Ragul Kumar got injured during the men's 4x400m and 4x100 races respectively as India ended their World Athletics Relays campaign in disappointment on the second day of competitions here on Sunday.
The Indian camp had high hopes of making the 2027 World Championships in the men's 4x400m relay but the team did not finish (DNF) the race as Jacob suffered cramps and pulled out of the race after taking the baton from the first leg runner Dharamveer Choudhary. Rajesh Ramesh and Vishal TK were to run in the third and fourth legs.
Those teams which could not qualify for the 2027 Beijing World Championships by reaching the final round of each of the six relay events on Saturday were given another chance in the second qualification round on Sunday.
The top two teams in each of the two heats (in all six relay events) booked the Beijing ticket on Sunday.
India will now have to try and qualify for the World Championships through the Top Lists of the World Athletics, which is a long and tedious process.
In the men's 4x100m race, third leg runner Ragul Kumar fell down the track after failing to hand over the baton inside the exchange zone to fourth leg runner Gurindervir Singh, which clearly showed the lack of coordination among the runners.
Harsh Santosh Raut and Animesh Kujur ran the first two legs.
The Indian quartet was disqualified and Kumar was seen being taken away from the Field of Play with the help of the volunteers.
It was a comedy of errors in the case of the women's 4x100m race, which saw the baton being dropped during an exchange between first leg runner Tamanna and second runner Nithya Gandhe, though the Indians finished the race in 53.09 seconds.
Gandhe started running quite a distance, but after realising that the baton was not in her hand, she turned and ran back to pick it up.
The only silver-lining for the Indian contingent was the national record time in the mixed 4x100m relay race, though the quartet of Ragul Kumar, Nithya Gandhe, Animesh Kujur and Sneha SS finished sixth in heat number two with a time of 41.35 seconds, bettering the previous national mark of 42.30 seconds set in March in Chandigarh.
The mixed 4x400m relay quartet of Theerthesh P Shetty, Kumari Saloni, Nihal William and Rashdeep Kaur ended at fifth in heat number one with a time of 3 minutes and 19.40 seconds.
On Saturday, all the five Indian relay teams had failed to make it to the respective final rounds and thus missed out on the 2027 World Championships berths.
