A special investigation team of Uttar Pradesh Police probing the accusations against Swami Chinmayanand and the accusations against the victim and her associates, have completed the investigation and filed two separate charge sheets in the court. One against the jailed former Union Minister Swami Chinmayanand in the alleged rape case and the other against the 23-year-old law student and her associates who are under arrest in a purported extortion case.
The probe team in the charge sheets said that all the analysed evidence against Chinmayanand and the student prove the charges against them and it is now up to the court to take cognizance. If it does, then a trial will start in both cases, confirmed the SIT of UP Police.
“We managed to file charge sheets in less than two months. In both investigations, we questioned 105 people, recovered 20 pieces of evidence and also a lot of digital evidence and Call Data Records. We recovered 55 paper trails and are submitting case diaries and charge sheets running into 4,700 pages,” aid Mr Naveen Arora, the head of the special investigation team (SIT).
While Swami Chinmayanand has been charged in a rape case, the law student who had accused Swami Chinmayanand and her associates who had been sent to 14-day judicial custody by a local court in Shahjahanpur have been charged with extortion, criminal intimidation and “disappearance of evidence”.
Recently, the SIT which has been in relentlessly probing the sexual assault case against Swami Chinmayanand recovered a pen drive and a laptop believed to contain video evidence of the incident from a local BJP leader, DPS Rathore, whom the SIT had been questioning for a marathon 12 hours.
Rathore is the younger brother of Uttar Pradesh BJP vice-president JPS Rathore. Both the leaders have been named in the chargesheet filed by the SIT, taking the number of those accused of trying to extort money from Chinmayanad 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.
“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 confirmed.
Chinmayanand was accused of rape by a law student in Uttar Pradesh’s Shahjahanpur. She had accused him of raping and sexually exploiting her after secretly filming her private videos.
After a huge controversy, Swami Chinmayanand, who was arrested on September 20 from his Mumuksha Ashram in Shahjahanpur, had admitted to almost every allegation levelled against him and had said that he was ashamed of his deeds.
The law student and her associates have also been arrested later on extortion charges.
After the controversy erupted, no BJP leader has come forward to extend any kind of support to Swami Chinmayanand, who has been in judicial custody since his arrest on September 20.
The Bharatiya Janta Party’ Uttar Pradesh unit had in September distanced itself from Swami Chinmayanand. The former BJP leader who was arrested by the SIT following charges of rape and physically exploitation on September 20 had been expelled from the party. “Chinmayanand isn’t a BJP member anymore,” confirmed UP BJP spokesperson Harish Chandra Srivastava.
