I am the real victim: deported Nepali woman’s husband

By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS,

Kathmandu : The influential husband of Nepali student Neetu Singh, whose deportation by Indian police for allegedly “anti-Indian activities” triggered an outcry in India, says he was the real victim after his return to Kathmandu.


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Amresh Kumar Singh, who was nominated to Nepal’s parliament four years ago by former prime minister and Nepal politics’ strongman Girija Prasad Koirala though he was not even a member of the ruling Nepali Congress party, arrived in Kathmandu Monday to be hounded by the media and acquaintances asking him about the allegations against him.

Media reports indicated that Neetu, who was a final year student at the Film and Television Institute in India’s Pune city, was deported by the police last month at Singh’s bidding as they had become estranged and he wanted her to return the property and assets she had received after the wedding.

Singh, a PhD student in New Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University who shot into prominence during the fag-end of the Maoist insurgency by acting as a go-between for Nepal’s political parties and the underground Maoist guerrillas, said he was dragged into a smear campaign just because he happened to be a politician.

Singh says he had no hand in the deportation of Neetu. He alleged that they had become estranged after she began having an affair with another man.

According to him, “the deportation was the result of the letters Neetu’s worried father wrote to Pune’s police commissioner, asking for help to rescue his daughter from the clutches of the man she was having an affair with”.

He said Neetu’s father, retired state education officer Ram Suresh Prasad Singh, and her brother Rupesh Singh, became concerned when Neetu failed to go home last year to attend her brother’s wedding “because her extramarital affair had started and she knew her family would disapprove”.

They went to Pune to meet her but she refused to meet them, Singh said.

Singh also showed two letters to the Kathmandu Post daily – one written in Hindi and the other in English – which were said to have been sent to the police commissioner in Pune by Neetu’s father, asking for help to rescue Neetu from “bad activities”.

Insisting Neetu was sent back to Nepal due to her father’s concern, Singh said he had been victimised though he had nothing to do with her return.

“My only crime is that I am a politician and there are people out to get me,” he said.

While the Neetu Singh incident has been snowballing in India, in Nepal there has been little interest in it.

The tabloids, usually agog with sensational happenings, have ignored it; so has the mainstream media virtually.

The issue was raised only Monday in parliament by lawmakers who asked the government to get India’s stand on the deportation.

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