Shielding rape accused can be a reason Akhilesh Yadav loses UP polls

Has rape accused Uttar Pradesh mining minister Gayatri Prajapati managed to hoodwink the police or does he enjoy the protection of chief minister Akhilesh Yadav?

The question has been doing the rounds ever since the police launched a much-hyped manhunt for the minister, whose escapades have been the talk of the town for nearly five years.

Having often been in the news for all the wrong reasons, Prajapati hit the headlines after the Supreme Court, on February 18, ordered a rape case to be registered against him. The victim had moved the apex court after continued apathy of the UP police, which refused to pay any heed to her repeated petitions.

It was only after the chief minister also turned a deaf ear to her appeal that she sought the intervention of the highest court. The victim had pointedly accused the minister and his henchmen of subjecting her to gangrape after she approached him to seek a mining contract in 2013.

She has stated that she remained tight-lipped and silently suffered the agony because she was threatened that her obscene photographs would be released on social media.

However, she mustered up courage to fight back only after she realised that the minister posed a threat to her minor daughter, who she feared would also get gangraped.

Despite such a background, Prajapati not only remained Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav’s blue-eyed boy, but far from denying him a party ticket, party president and chief minister Akhilesh Yadav chose to go and campaign for him in Amethi, the Assembly segment of Congress celebrity Rahul Gandhi’s Lok Sabha constituency.

Prajapati got the initial thrust soon after the 2012 Assembly election, simply because he managed to defeat Congress nominee Amita Singh, the second wife of Sanjay Singh, the scion of Amethi’s erstwhile royal family.

Prajapati soon established such an unparalleled rapport with Mulayam Singh Yadav that upon his rebuking of the ill-reputed minister, even Akhilesh received a snub from the father. Adept at wooing those who matter, Prajapati eventually managed to cast his spell on Akhilesh too.

That was demonstrated by the fact that Akhilesh did not take any drastic step against him during the course of the Yadav family feud, even as he dethroned his father and assumed presidentship of the party.

Perhaps, it also speaks for him going all the way to campaign for the most-tainted man in his cabinet. Under the circumstances, it was clear that Prajapati was enjoying official immunity from law.

While UP’s top cops were busy giving typical “official” explanations to cover up their failure to nab Prajapati, it was becoming increasingly evident that the desired effort was missing on account of a clear-cut lack of political will. Even a section of Samajwadi Party insiders believed that Prajapati would go scot free until the seventh and final phase of polling on March 8.

The reason was not far to seek. The SP leadership believed that Prajapati’s arrest could adversely affect the ruling party’s poll prospects as far as the vote of the Prajapati community — who form a fairly good chunk of the extreme OBCs and were believed to be gravitating towards BJP — were concerned.

Akhilesh was in no position to gamble with the community’s vote. Hence, allowing Prajapati a free run had apparently become a political compulsion for him. If that was not the case, then it had to be poor policing, which would belie Akhilesh’s tall claims about "modernisation” of the UP police , with mechanisms like "Dial 100" on the lines of "911" in the US.

Sure enough, Akhilesh has been drawing a lot of flak on this account, with both Narendra Modi as well as Mayawati systematically training their guns on him during the poll campaign.

They have been running down Akhilesh by making snide remarks about how UP cops went overboard to recover minister Azam Khan’s "stolen" buffaloes, but were unable to track down a rape accused minister who was evading arrest. Akhilesh has precious little in his defence. 

He is surely left on the horns of a serious dilemma — to either admit his unwillingness to use the arm of law against an outlaw, or concede that his police is grossly inefficient.