2012 Park Street gangrape convict Naser Khan accused of molesting a woman in Kolkata
Park Street gangrape convict, Naser Khan, has been accused of molesting and attacking a woman at a five-star hotel in Kolkata. The incident happened on Sunday (26th October) around 4:15 am in the Hyatt Regency at Bidhannagar. An FIR was filed at Bidhannagar South Police Station against Naser Khan and his nephew Junaid Khan on the charges of voluntarily causing hurt, criminal force and assault and solitary confinement of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita.
According to the complaint filed by the victim, she was hanging out with her husband, brother and some friends at the Play Boy club inside the Hyatt Regency. The accused arrived and picked a fight with them, attacked them with beer bottles and tried to touch her inappropriately. “When my brother tried to protect (me), they started throwing glass bottles at us. We tried to run away from the hotel to safety, but Junaid Khan called around 20 boys and started attacking us,” the victim reportedly stated in the complaint.
“I called 100, dialled the number to get instant help, but they blocked all the doors. A few boys started pushing me and touching me in a very bad way in my private area. I have attached the medical report, and you can find all the attacking videos on the CCTV of the restaurant club,” she added. The police have not made any arrests so far.
Vicitm kept hiding for about half an hour and was rescused by the police
The victim said that she had kept hiding in the club’s liquor room for about half an hour after the accused sexually assaulted and attacked her. She said that she was rescued by the police from the liquor room. The police have not made any arrests in the case so far.
Who is Naser Khan
Businessman Naser Khan was among the five people convicted of gangraping a 40-year-old Anglo-Indian woman, Suzette Jordan, inside a moving car in the posh Park Street area of Kolkata in 2013. The woman, mother of two daughters, was abducted by the accused in a car in front of a nightclub in February 2012, and was gangraped for hours inside the moving car before being dumped near a road crossing, a couple of kilometres from where she was picked. Naser Khan, who was given a 10-year sentence, was released from jail in 2012, a little over a year before his sentence was to end, on the grounds of “good behaviour”.
Rampant cases of sexual violence in West Bengal and victim blaming of CM Mamata Banerjee
Cases of sexual violence against women have been on the rise in West Bengal despite the state having a woman Chief Minister. The situation is exacerbated by the callous attitude displayed by CM Mamata Banerjee and the TMC politicians towards the victims of such incidents. Instead of ensuring accountability and adopting measures to curb sexual violence against women in the state, the woman Chief Minister either blames the victims or dismisses the incidents as a conspiracy against her government.
Recently, CM Mamata Banerjee put the blame on the victim of sexual violence in a gangrape case that happened in West Bengal’s Durgapur. A second-year MBBS student from Odisha was gang-raped by Apu Bauri, Firdos Sekh, Sekh Reajuddin and two others in a jungle area on Friday (10th October) night in West Bengal’s Durgapur. Ironically, while expressing shock over the incident, CM Mamata Banerjee blamed the victim for the rape. She said that women should not be allowed to go outside college at night and that women should protect themselves. This was not the first time the Chief Minister downplayed a heinous offence like rape. Similar insensitivity was displayed by CM Mamata Banerjee, after the 2012 Park Street gangrape incident, which she dismissed as a concocted incident and a conspiracy to malign his government. Such insensitivity and the lack of accountability displayed by the Chief Minister emboldens the criminals and adds to the plight of the victims.
In another recent case, which happened a month before the Durgapur gangrape case, a young woman was raped by a Trinamool Congress (TMC) worker and his aide in Haridevpur locality of Kolkata after the accused invited her to celebrate her birthday. The accused kept the victim locked in a room the entire night and took turns to rape her. This was preceded by another gangrape case in July this year, where a 24-year-old female student was gang-raped inside the South Calcutta Law College, Kasba, in the South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, by three men. The horrifying incident happened less than a year after the gruesome RG Kar Medical College rape and murder case, in which a 31-year-old postgraduate trainee doctor was brutally raped and killed while on duty inside the medical college.
In 2013, during a debate in the West Bengal legislative assembly about the rising cases of rapes in the State, the CM had insinuated that it was due to an increase in the population of the State. She had also blamed modernisation, an increase in shopping malls and multiplexes, for rising rape cases. Even during the 2024 Sandeshkhali unrest, Mamata Banerjee attempted to downplay the harassment and sexual exploitation of women at the hands of Trinamool Congress goons by calling it a “minor incident”.
NCRB data exposes an alarming state of women’s safety in the TMC-ruled state
The grim situation regarding women’s safety in West Bengal was exposed by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report for the year 2023. The “Crime in India” report of the NCRB revealed that West Bengal recorded 34,691 cases of crimes against women under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Special and Local Laws (SLL). While this marks a marginal decline from 34,738 cases in 2022, the number is one of the highest in the country. The statistics translates to a crime rate of 71.3 cases per lakh female population.
The NCRB data also shows that West Bengal alone accounted for 27.5% of all acid attacks in the country in the year 2023. In 2022, West Bengal recorded 48 acid attacks with 52 victims, out of 202 cases nationwide. In this crime category, the TMC-ruled state is leading the country since 2018. In addition to that, the recorded 7 cases of murder with rape/gangrape, 350 dowry deaths and 419 incidents of abetment to suicide of women in 2023.