The Congress' grassroots front organisation, Seva Dal, held a candlelight march here, demanding justice for the nine-year-old Dalit girl who was allegedly raped and murdered in Delhi earlier this week. The participants, including scores of Congress functionaries and office-bearers, gathered at the statue of Shaheed Bhagat at the clock tower trisection on Friday night. They also observed a two-minute silence in the memory of the victim.
According to the girl's parents, she went out around 5:30 pm on August 1 to get cold water from a cooler at a crematorium opposite their house in southwest Delhi's Old Nangal area.
Around 6 pm, the crematorium's priest, Radhey Shyam, and two-three others called the girl's mother to the spot. Showing the girl's body to her mother, they claimed that she got electrocuted while getting water from the cooler.
It was alleged that the priest and the others dissuaded the girl's mother from making a PCR call, saying the police would make a case out of it and during the post-mortem, doctors would steal the girl's organs, so it was better to cremate her.
Addressing the gathering, Congress leader Satish Sharma claimed women and girls are not safe under the BJP's rule and demanded capital punishment for those responsible for the Dalit girl's death.
Criminals are committing crimes of every kind while the police have become silent spectators. The Dalit community is being harassed and tortured under the BJP's rule, he alleged.
Instead of taking stringent action against the culprits, the BJP is accusing the Congress of politicising the tragedy, Sharma said. BJP leaders are perturbed because Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had visited the victim's family on Wednesday, he claimed.
Four people, including the crematorium priest, have been arrested in connection with the incident. The accused have been booked for murder and rape.
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