Rights panel summons MP for remarks on Park Street rape

Kolkata: The West Bengal Human Rights Commission on Wednesday issued summons to Trinamool Congress MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar who had called the Park Street rape case a ‘sex deal gone wrong’. “The commission has asked the MP to appear before it and explain the remarks she made about the victim. The commission is offering her a chance to defend herself,” the panel’s joint secretary Sujay Kumar Haldar said.  Talking about the February 6, 2012, case in which an Anglo-Indian woman was allegedly raped at gunpoint in a moving car in the early hours by a gang of five after picking her up from Park Street, Ghosh Dastidar claimed it to be a “sex deal gone wrong”. “If you are referring to the Park Street case, it was not at all a rape case. It was a misunderstanding between two parties involved in a sexual dealing - the lady and her clients. It was not a rape,” Ghosh Dastidar told a TV news channel on December 28 last year. The commission has also obtained an approval from the office of Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar to summon the Member of Parliament (MP). The commission also urged Kolkata Police to speed up investigations and sought the footage from the television channel wherein the MP made the remarks. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee too had courted controversy after she dubbed the allegation as “cooked-up to malign my government”. After more than a year, a court on February 19 framed charges of gangrape against three of the accused who were arrested. The police, in their charge sheet submitted in May last year, named five people of whom three are behind bars. However, two others, including prime accused Kader Khan, are yet to be arrested. IANS