UDUPI: After the episode of alleged voyeurism by three girls of a paramedical college in Udupi, social media went abuzz with posts by right-wing activists naming the accused girls and seeking police action against them on Tuesday.
On July 19, three women students of the private college were suspended for allegedly filming a fellow student using a mobile phone inside a washroom.
The incident took a communal turn after pro-Hindu Twitter handles named the accused Muslim girls while claiming that they targeted some Hindu girls.
However, Udupi SP Akshay M Hakay clarified that the episode was dealt with at the college level and the videos have not been circulated as alleged.
The accused girls admitted before the college authority to doing the act for “fun” and they deleted the same after the victims came to know and objected. The SP said the girls have been suspended by the college. There was no police complaint in this regard as the victims themselves did not want the matter to be escalated further, he added.
Many BJP leaders, including CT Ravi and Udupi MLA Yashpal Suvarna, supported right-wing activist Rashmi Samant’s tweet stating that the Congress government was trying to silence the voice of right-wing activists.
‘Tweets reasonable exercise of freedom of speech’
Suvarna visited the house of Rashmi in Manipal and met her parents. He said that police “harassed” the activist instead of taking action against the girls who engaged in alleged voyeurism.
“At 8 pm, a group of policemen visited the residence of my client, @RashmiDVS,” Delhi-based advocate Adhitya Srinivasan tweeted on Monday.
Rashmi was the first Indian woman to be elected as president of the Oxford Student Union. But she quit in a few days over a controversy surrounding her past remarks and social media posts.
Srinivasan stated, “As Rashmi was not at home at the time, it was her parents who were questioned by the police and repeatedly asked about her whereabouts. Multiple calls were made by the police to her father in the evening to try and locate Rashmi. It is clear that the police visited my client’s residence in connection with her recent tweets condemning the secret video recording of Hindu girls in a college toilet.”
He stated that her tweets are a fair and reasonable exercise of her freedom of speech and expression.
Regarding police visiting the house of Rashmi, police sources said they went to her house “only to verify” if she had tweeted or someone else had faked her Twitter handle.