Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said the brutality that happened with a nine-year-old girl in Puducherry has shocked everyone and asserted that safety and respect for women is the identity of a developed nation.
His remarks came after a girl’s body was retrieved from a drain near her house in Muthialpet block in Puducherry.
The body was found in a sack floating in a drain near her house on Tuesday, a few days after her parents filed a missing complaint with the police. According to the police, her hands and legs were found tied with ropes.
In a post on X in Hindi, Gandhi said, “The brutality that happened with a nine-year-old girl in Puducherry has shocked everyone. After all, why are incidents of crimes against daughters continuously increasing in the country?”
In 2022 alone, there were 4.5 lakh incidents of crime against women, out of which 31,000 cases were of rape only, he said.
“Be it Ankita Bhandari’s family sitting on the road in Uttarakhand or the husband who hanged himself along with his children after not getting justice for the incident of misbehaviour with his wife in Madhya Pradesh, or the Spanish tourist who became a victim of gang-rape in Jharkhand, every such incident is a reflection of an insensitive system and a cruel society, which is a matter of introspection for us as a nation,” Gandhi said.
Safety and respect for women is the identity of a ‘viksit rashtra’ (developed nation), he added.
The girl was a class five student in a government school in Muthialpet. Facing protests from residents, police had launched an extensive search to trace the girl, sources said.
Police sources said two suspects have been taken into custody.
Source Agencies
