A few days after India's National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) had issued a notice to Twitter India seeking action against senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for revealing the identity of a nine-year-old girl, an alleged rape victim, the micro-blogging site has taken down his controversial tweet.
On Wednesday, Gandhi, after meeting the deceased's parents, shared videos and photos on social media in which he can be seen sitting with the victim's parents in his car and consoling them as they cried their hearts out.
His posts soon sparked a social media uproar as netizens slammed Gandhi for being "insensitive" and "irresponsible" and going against the law, which prohibits the revealing of the identity of a rape victim's parents in the media.
Priyank Kanoongo, the chairperson of NCPCR, said the child rights body had received a complaint to take action against Rahul Gandhi and directed Twitter to remove the controversial tweets revealing the victim's identity.
Though the tweet has since been deleted, netizens on social media are demanding criminal proceedings against Gandhi for committing a grave offence. Some are also calling his behaviour a desperate attempt to be in the media spotlight.
Very insensitive of Rahul Gandhi to expose the identity of Rape victim & her parents by tweeting their picture on social media. This is a grave violation of Juvenile Justice law and goes against basic decency of civilised society pic.twitter.com/rcG6U3wXEO
Flashback to the Case
On 1 August, a nine-year-old Dalit girl from southwest Delhi's Old Nangal Village went to a crematorium near her home to fetch drinking water from a cooler.
About half an hour later, the crematorium's priest Radhey Shyam (55) and three workers Kuldeep Kumar (63), Laxmi Narain (48), and Mohd Salim (49), known to the family, rushed to the girl's home and informed her parents that the child had been electrocuted while getting water from the cooler and lost her life.
The girl's mother who rushed to the scene claimed the priest and the workers allegedly raped, murdered, and cremated her daughter forcefully and also dissuaded her from sounding an alarm and filing a police complaint.
The Delhi Police took the four accused into custody on Sunday and has registered a rape case based on the statements of the deceased's mother. An investigation into the matter is now ongoing.