BHOPAL: A court in Madhya Pradesh’s Rajgarh district acquitted a former ward councillor of rape charges on finding that the complainant levelled the allegations against him because his complaint had led to the demolition of her home. Although Shafiq Ansari has now been proven innocent, he no longer has a house of his own. His home was bulldozed by the administration less than 10 days after the woman filed the complaint in March 2021. “I had built the house on 4,000sqft of land with my hard-earned savings. Now, there’s only rubble. We are staying in my brother’s house,” Ansari (58) told TOI Friday.
“We had all the papers. It was alleged that the house was built without permission, but we were not provided a chance to show records or say anything. It was simply torn down. I have a family of seven. They all suffered. I went to jail for three months,” said Ansari, a former corporator of Sarangpur civic body, around 130km from Bhopal. As per the woman’s complaint on March 4, 2021, Ansari called her to his house on Feb 4, 2021, on the pretext of offering help for her son’s wedding but raped her.
Ansari’s house was demolished on March 13, 2021. “They came at 7am. The administration arrived with bulldozers, and before my family members could understand anything, my house was in ruins. I was absconding at that time. I surrendered the next day,” Ansari said.
The verdict came on Feb 14 this year. First additional sessions ju dge of Rajgarh district, Chitrendra Singh Solanki, noted “significant inconsistencies” in the testimonies of the woman and her husband. The court observed that although there is a police station close to her house, which was demolished, she did not report the alleged rape immediately. For 15 days after her son’s wedding, she neither informed her husband or any of her sons about the alleged crime, and no reason was given for this delay, the court noted. No human sperm was found on samples of the complainant, the order said, concluding that rape could not be confirmed from clinical and scientific evidence.
Ansari plans to move court seeking justice for the demolition of his house.