NEW DELHI: With an eye on the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, the National Commission for Women (NCW) led by BJP leader Lalitha Kumarmangalam is holding a series of public hearings over the next one month to take note of cases of atrocities against women. The Jan Sunwais began with Ghaziabad on August 5.
In an indication that the public hearings are an attempt to show that the Akhilesh Yadav-led government has been unable to check crimes against women, the commission has decided to hold the hearings in constituencies of BJP leaders from the state.
A public meeting in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency Varanasi will be held next week. Some other places where the hearings will be held are Shamli, Rampur and Lucknow.
“It is not that since elections are due in the state that we are doing it. Uttar Pradesh has one of the highest rates of crime against women. The Samajwadi Party government has not only failed to contain it, but also it failed to address the issue,” commission chairperson Kumarmangalam told Express. “We plan to hold three to four such public hearings every month.”
According to Kumarmangalam, the largest number of complaints which the commission gets are from Uttar Pradesh. “Last year, we got nearly 16,000 complaints from the state. This year, around 60 percent of complaints are from the state,” she said.
In a recent report, the Comptroller and Auditor General said that nearly 60 per cent of rape survivors in Uttar Pradesh since 2010 were minors.