A special court in Kottayam, Kerala, on Monday issued arrest warrants against the 23 persons convicted in the case pertaining to the Suryanelli serial rape scandal of 1996 in which a 16-year-old girl was brutally raped by 42 men in 41 days.
The court, where the trial in the case was concluded in 2000, issued the arrest warrants in the context of the High Court upholding its verdict handing down sentences to 24 of the accused. It directed the convicted accused to surrender before it at the earliest. The High Court had upheld the trial’s court verdict on April 4.
The trial court’s step came just as protests were being raised by various quarters over the lack of action even after the order of the High Court, which also upheld the life imprisonment awarded to prime accused Dharmarajan. The High Court had sentenced the other 23 convicts to imprisonment of terms between three and ten years. It also acquitted seven accused.
The Suryanelli scandal had become sensational even in the national level with the victim alleging that Congress leader and Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien was one of the rapists. Though Kurien’s name has been cleared by the police and various courts, the victim, now 33, persists in the allegation and her plea against him is under the consideration of the High Court.
The special division bench of the High Court comprising Justices KT Sankaran and Ml Joseph Francis had rejected the humiliating observations - that the victim had acted like a child prostitute, that she did not try to escape and that she was of deviant behavior — which another bench had made in 2005 while acquitting the 35 accused.
In the April 4 order, the High Court had stated that there was no reason to disbelieve the statements of the victim and the evidences she provided. It said that she could not be considered a child prostitute as there was no evidence of her accepting money from anyone. Instead, Dharmarajan and others had forcibly taken all the money and gold ornaments she had.
The 16-year-old girl from Suryanelli was abducted on January 16, 1996 as she left her school in Munnar where she was a Class 9 student and was brutally raped in captivity by several men at various places where her lover Raju, his accomplice Usha and Dharmarajan had taken her till they left her back at her village in a terrible condition on February 26.