Chinmayanand extortion case: Two BJP leaders from UP among six to be charge-sheeted by SIT

Shahjahanpur (UP), Nov. 5 (PTI): The Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing sexual harassment allegations against former union minister Swami Chinmayanand will file a charge sheet in court in the related extortion case on Wednesday against six accused, including two BJP leaders, a senior police official said.
“The probe into the case has been completed and charge sheet will be filed in the court tomorrow. The pen drive which was snatched from the victim law student in Dausa (Rajasthan), has been recovered from BJP leaders DPS Rathore and Ajit Singh,” IG-rank officer Naveen Arora, heading the SIT, told reporters here on Tuesday.

Rathore is the younger brother of Uttar Pradesh BJP vice-president JPS Rathore.

“These leaders had snatched the pen drive from the law student in Dausa, Rajasthan, and had viewed the contents on their laptop. They had later deleted the pictures and demanded Rs 1.25 crore from Chinmayanand to help ensure disposal of the matter. Both have been found guilty on this count,” Arora said on the probe.

With this, the number of those accused of trying to extort money from Chinmayanand has gone up to six.

The other four accused are the law student, who had charged Chinmayanand with sexual harassment, Sanjay, Vikram and Sachin. All of them are in jail.

Arora said that it was found during investigation that the law student used to lock her room in the hostel, though she claimed that in her absence some vital evidence were removed by the college administration.

This charge of the law student has not been found true in the investigations as even before going to Delhi, Sanjay had put all important things in a box and kept it at the house of a person named Rahul, Arora said.

He said that when the probe and arrests started, the box was thrown in a drain and the SIT which retreived it later did not find the spectacles with camera, the evidence which the law student had alleged had gone missing.

“The spectacles which the law student said she had used for making the video of Chinmayanand while giving him massage had been removed either by Sanjay or the victim herself,” Arora added.

The SIT was constituted by the Uttar Pradesh government on the orders of the Supreme Court in September to investigate the charges levelled by the woman, who was then a postgraduate student at a college run by Chinmayanand’s trust.

Chinmayanand was arrested on September 21. Police had on August 27 booked him under sections 364 (kidnapping or abducting in order to murder) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code based on the father’s complaint.

He was later booked under section 376C of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which is usually applied in cases where a person abuses his position to “induce or seduce” a woman under his charge to have “sexual intercourse not amounting to the offence of rape”.

The woman went missing since August 24, a day after she posted a video on social media alleging that a “senior leader of the sant community” was harassing and threatening to kill her.

Her father had filed a complaint with the police, accusing 72-year-old Chinmayanand of sexually harassing her, a charge refuted by the former Union minister’s lawyer who claimed it was a “conspiracy” to blackmail him.