By IANS,
Lucknow : The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court Monday fined a petitioner Rs.50 lakh for falsely accusing Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi of gangrape of a girl in his Amethi parliamentary constituency.The court has also directed the state government to probe the controversy in order to ascertain if there was a political conspiracy behind the petition.
The order followed appearance of the alleged victim before the court, where she vehemently denied the allegation.
Taking a very serious view of the matter, a division bench comprising Justice Umanath Gupta and Justice Satish Chandra ruled that half of the fine of Rs.50 lakh would go to the girl.
The girl would get Rs.25 lakh, Rahul Gandhi Rs.20 lakh and Rs.5 lakh for the police team which tracked down the girl and brought her before court, the state government’s chief counsel Devendra Upadhaya told IANS.
“The court also considers it necessary that an inquiry is carried out by an independent agency to find out if there was a political design behind the move,” he added.
The petition was moved by Kishore Samrite, former Samajwadi Party legislator from Madhya Pradesh.
Samrite had accused the Congress leader and his five foreigner friends of gangraping the 24-year-old.
Claiming to have learnt this from some news website, the petitioner had stated: “I was moved by the news, so I came all the way from my home in Balaghat in Madhya Pradesh to Amethi where I found the girl’s house locked. The local villagers were tight-lipped about the whereabouts of the girl.”
Samrite claimed that being a social worker, he felt it was his moral duty to move a habeas corpus petition before the Allahabad High Court.