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Alleged harassment of nuns: SP Railway rushes to Jhansi for formal probe
Superintendent of police (Railway, Lucknow) Somitra Yadav rushed to Jhansi to start a formal inquiry into the alleged harassment of two nuns and two young postulants taken off the train by the railway police after some people supposedly associated with Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarathi Parishad (ABVP) suspected the young women were being taken for forced conversion
Superintendent of police (Railway, Lucknow) Somitra Yadav rushed to Jhansi to start a formal inquiry into the alleged harassment of two nuns and two young postulants taken off the train by the railway police after some people supposedly associated with Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarathi Parishad (ABVP) suspected the young women were being taken for forced conversion.
Yadav would look into the incident in entirety and submit his report to the inspector general (Railway) Satyendra Kumar Singh. The inquiry was given to SP (Railway, Lucknow) as no one has been posted as SP (Railway) in Jhansi.
Singh said the inquiry would deal with the all the aspects of the case, including the mental trauma caused to the nuns and the postulants.
The inquiry was ordered hours after Union home minister Amit Shah assured at a public rally in election-bound Kerala that strong action would be taken against those who harassed the nuns. The issue snowballed into a major controversy after Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi took the nuns’ case up at a time the BJP was reaching out to the Christian community, which accounts for 16% of the electorate in Kerala.
The nuns and postulants of the Sacred Hearts Congregation, New Delhi, were traveling by Utkal Express on March 19. The two young women accompanying the nuns were returning to their native place Rourkela in Odisha after completing their course at the centre.
ABVP leaders also travelling on the train suspected that the young girls were being taken for conversion. A leader identified, according to inspector (GRP Jhansi) Sunil Singh, as Ajay Tiwari informed the Railway Protection Force (RPF) control room. As the train reached Jhansi railway station, the RPF personnel got into the train.
A video that has surfaced and went viral on social media shows the policemen allegedly threatening and misbehaving with the nuns who were also forced to show their Aadhaar cards. A GRP official said the local GRP team reached the train on getting information about the commotion.
“On reaching there, it found the nuns and postulants had already been taken off the train; since the GRP is a reporting thana, the ABVP leaders gave a written complaint on which inquiry was done and accusations were found false,” he said.
“At the time our men reached, 20-22 people were there and charged up. The nuns and postulants were brought to the GRP station at 8pm. On being asked, the young women said they were Christians by birth,” he said, adding that then the officials of St Jude’s Church Jhansi also showed their baptism certificates to police officials.
The nuns and the postulants remained in the police station for three hours before they were released in the custody of church officials. They spent the night in Jhansi before leaving for Rourkela the next day on March 20.
