Taken Into Custody, Sent To Jail After Conviction
Lucknow: A court in Sonbhadra district on Tuesday held BJP MLA Ramdular Gond guilty of raping a 15-year-old girl in a 2014 case. Gond, a first-time MLA who won the 2022 election from the Duddhi constituency, was out on bail in the case. The quantum of punishment will be pronounced on December 15.
Additional district judge (first), MP/MLA Court, Ehsan Ullah Khan, found the MLA guilty in the 2014 rape case, said special public prosecutor (Pocso) Satyaprakash Tripathi. “After the court held MLA Gond guilty, he was immediately taken into custody,” he added.
Rape survivor’s advocate Vikas Shakya said that the charges that Gond faces usually invite a sentence between seven years and life imprisonment. In such a scenario, Gond will lose his assembly membership, as according to the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling, any MP or MLA convicted of a crime and given a minimum of two years’ imprisonment, loses membership of the House with immediate effect.
Shakya said the MLA was found guilty under Indian Penal Code’s sections 376 (rape) 506 (punishment for criminal intimidation) and under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act. Shakya said that eight prosecution and three defence witnesses were examined by the court.
Expressing satisfaction over the MLA’s conviction, the rape survivor’s brother said that he wished an imprisonment of not less than 20 years for Gond. He alleged that Gond kept harassing the family after becoming the MLA and pressured them to withdraw the case.
At the time of the incident, Gond’s wife was the village pradhan.
According to a senior officer in prosecution, Gond had allegedly caught the girl and tried to sexually assault her when she had gone to a nearby field to attend nature’s call in the evening of November 4, 2014.
Somehow the survivor managed to return home and narrated her ordeal to elder brother who was a farmer. “The survivor also told her brother that Gond had raped her several times in the past one year by threatening her,” the officer added.
Myorpur police had registered a case against the MLA on the complaint of the girl’s brother.
During the trial, the prosecution claimed that the girl was born in 1998, while the MLA produced school documents claiming she was born in 1994, said Tripathi.
“When her statement was recorded in court during the trial, the girl was married. She is staying with her family now,” Tripathi added.
Gond had defeated his closest rival, Vijay Singh of the Samajwadi Party, by 6,723 votes in the 2022 assembly elections.
After he was elected the MLA, the files were transferred from the Pocso court to the MP-MLA court.
