The elder sister of the Unnao rape survivor said on Wednesday that henchmen of suspended BJP leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar came to her house hours after Delhi High Court suspended his jail sentence and threatened to kill everyone in the family.
The elder sister said the justice system of the country would be responsible if any harm came to the family.
“Soon after the court granted him bail in the rape case, his goons came to our house and declared that now they would kill each one of us. But we are relieved to hear that he will not be out of jail at the moment,” she told reporters in Unnao’s Makhi village.
“We have come to know there were celebrations at Sengar’s house last night after the court order,” the sister added.
The houses of the survivor, who now lives with her family in Delhi, and former Unnao MLA Sengar are barely 200 metres apart. The survivor’s sister lives in Makhi with her family.
A Delhi High Court bench of Justice Subramonium Prasad and Justice Harish Vaidyanathan Shankar on Tuesday suspended Sengar’s life sentence during the pendency of his appeal against his conviction in the rape case. The court has asked him not to be within 5km of the victim and stay put in Delhi during the duration of his bail.
However, Sengar will remain in jail as he is also serving a 10-year term for the murder of the survivor’s father. His appeal in this case is scheduled to be heard by Delhi High Court on January 16.
The survivor’s sister said: “He is not alone; he runs a gang of criminals. The court should know that no single human being is capable of committing crimes of the magnitude of those committed by Sengar. His gang helps him and stands by him in every crime. His bail in the rape case has only made his gang more brazen.”
She said the whole country knew how Sengar had tormented the family, alleging that his gang had also killed her eldest uncle and implicated her youngest uncle in a fake case of possessing illegal weapons when he tried to help the victim pursue the legal battle.
The elder sister said Sengar tried to kill the survivor several times, including in July 2018 when a truck hit a car in which she was going to Rae Bareli along with her lawyer. The lawyer died and she was seriously injured.
“We are shocked to know that a convicted rapist has got bail. Who in the country doesn’t know that Sengar is the worst kind of animal?” the survivor’s sister said.
The survivor had said on Tuesday that she was unhappy with the verdict and feared for the safety of her children, husband and physically challenged mother-in-law.
Sengar was awarded a life sentence for raping the survivor, then a minor, in his house on June 4, 2017. He was also handed a 10-year sentence for conspiring to kill her father, who was beaten in Unnao jail and died of his injuries in April 2018.
The survivor had submitted her first written complaint with the police in August 2017, but Sengar allegedly started targeting her and her family more aggressively. The FIR was eventually filed in April 2018 when the survivor and her mother tried to immolate themselves in front of the residence of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister.
The case was later handed over to the CBI, which charged Sengar with criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, rape and sexually abusing a minor under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act. The CBI had stated in a letter to the state government in August 2020 that senior police and administrative officers tried to protect Sengar.
But Sengar never remained dormant even after he was sent to jail. There were several occasions when his men put up banners and posters with his pictures across Unnao district.
Over a dozen BJP MPs and MLAs have supported Sengar in the past and claimed that he has been implicated by the Opposition. He was suspended from the party in August 2019, 15 months after the CBI arrested him in the rape case.
While claiming that they were empowering the survivor’s family, the Congress had fielded her mother in the 2022 Assembly elections from Unnao, but she lost to the BJP.
