GUWAHATI: An Adivasi (tea tribe) woman in Assam will file a defamation suit against Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath and BJP’s Tezpur MP RP Sharma after a 10-year-old photo, showing her stripped naked and running across a street, surfaced from a Facebook account bearing the UP CM’s name.
The defamation case against the duo will be filed in the district court of Biswanath Chariali on Tuesday.
Sharma had supported the post and also shared it on social media. The All Adivasi Students’ Association of Assam had on Sunday filed a case with the police demanding action against the “miscreant” who posted the photograph. Assam’s director general of police, Mukesh Sahay, told The New Indian Express that an investigation into the case was on. The Quint reported that a Yogi Adityanath page on Facebook, which has over 95,000 followers, shared a photo of a woman running across a street, stripped naked.
“The post claims that the ‘Hindu woman’ was stripped by the Congress workers for allegedly raising slogans in support of the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The post also calls for people to share the post and ‘expose the true face of Congress’ to the world,” the Quint report said. According to the Facebook post, the incident took place in Bengal but there was no mention about the time.
A November 26, 2007, report of The Telegraph read, “A young Adivasi woman ran down a Guwahati street naked, stripped by ethnic rioters, while leering city youths clicked away with their cellphone cameras”. After the incident, the police had arrested three “tormentors” of the victim, the report said.
“The three had pounced on her like a pack of dogs and started stripping her. All her pleas fell on deaf ears till they had stripped her naked. Only then did they let her go,” The Telegraph had reported quoting a police officer. The incident occurred after a protest march, taken out by Adivasis demanding scheduled tribe (ST) status for the community, had turned violent. Laxmi Orang, the victim, was among the tribals. She got married in due course and is now a mother of a two-year-old son. She told The New Indian Express on Monday that she would not rest till she got justice.
“I have already discussed the matter with my lawyer and I will file a defamation case against Yogi Adityanath and RP Sharma tomorrow (Tuesday). The UP CM should have been careful while posting the photograph. Would he have done so if the victim was a member of his family? I won’t tolerate if a politician tries to score some brownie points by taking advantage of my nude photo,” Orang said.
“I have been suffering the ignominy for 10 years. Where was the Tezpur MP all these years? It was not appropriate on his part to come out in support of the post,” she said. Insisting that she should get justice, Orang said she would demand the arrest of Adityanath and Sharma. She said she would hit the streets along with her kid if the duo was not arrested.