National

Two-member Congress team visits Patan college

AHMEDABAD: A two-member team of Congress Parliamentary Women’s Empowerment Committee sent by the party president, Sonia Gandhi, visited the sex scandal-rocked primary teachers’ training college in Patan in north Gujarat and demanded the resignation of the Chief Minister, Narendra Modi.

The team members, Prabha Thakur and Krishna Tirth, both members of the Rajya Sabha, also demanded a CBI inquiry into the sensational scandal of gang rape of a scheduled caste student by six teachers of the same college.

Talking to mediapersons, Ms. Thakur and Ms. Tirth said talking to the family members of the rape victim and other girl students of the college, who also complained of sexual harassment by some male teachers of the college, had clearly established the State government’s total failure in giving necessary protection to the girls in the college.

Expressing surprise at the appointment of all male teachers in the training college for girls, the two leaders said the former Education Minister and now holding the revenue portfolio, Anandiben Patel was to be blamed for the sordid episode. They said they had been told that some people had informed Ms. Patel about the goings-on on the college campus and how the girl students were being sexually exploited by the teachers in the name of giving internal marks, but she failed to take any remedial measures and did not even take cognisance of the complaints.

Demanding the Modi government’s resignation, they said while on one side it was running a “save the girl child” campaign to rectify the male-female ratio imbalance, it had left the girl students, particularly those belonging to the weaker sections of society, to the mercy of God.

After the victory in the December Assembly elections, the BJP government had become insensitive to the people’s problems, they said and questioned why Mr Modi did not even bother to visit Patan despite the scandal ragingfor the last one week or so.

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