CHANDIGARH: Vikas Barala and his partner in the alleged midnight stalking of Varnika Kundu in Chandigarh have to spend the next two weeks in the clink but in the meantime their friends are putting up a defence of the duo that’s sure to rile women even more.
On the day the two men were sent to 14 days in judicial custody, their supporters set up a Facebook page called Justice for Vikas Barala claiming that the son of Haryana BJP president Subhash Barala was wrongly implicated in the case.
Late Saturday night, 2,959 people signed up to follow the page and 2,889 people liked it.
What is sure to get the goat of activists fighting for women’s safety is that they proceed to question Varnika Kundu’s version of the story. One post claims that Varnika is a close friend of the son of former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and her father V S Kundu, an IAS officer, was close to Hooda. It further alleges that the plan to defame the present government was hatched the Hooda’s farmhouse.
Taking the conspiracy theory even further, the post says Varnika is a friend of Gurmehar Kaur (the student of the Lady Shriram College in Delhi who stood up to Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) earlier this year).
While that still does not explain why they chose to chase Varnika’s car in the dead, the post claims that Vikas and Ashish decided to chase the woman’s car as it had brushed their vehicle earlier. One of the posts on the Facebook page shares a video of a disco where Varnika Kundu did the duties as a DJ.
Despite these protestations of a conspiracy, police sources said that both accused admitted they were having a beer in their SUV when they saw Varnika in her car and decided to follow her. They also told the police they were drunk and did not know what they were doing.
But materially, they admitted that the two men seen in the CCTV footage of the chase were indeed them.
Police produced both accused before magistrate Gaurav Datta on Saturday and asked for judicial remand of fourteen days. The court allowed the application.