New Delhi: The BJP on Thursday expelled its jailed Uttar Pradesh lawmaker Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who is accused of raping a minor girl from Unnao.According to a report in ANI, sources within the BJP said that the party had expelled Sengar.The move comes days after the outrage over a road collision in Uttar Pradesh in which the 19-year-old Unnao rape survivor was critically injured while two of her aunts died.The woman’s family and leaders of the opposition have claimed that Sengar, the main rape accused, had engineered the “accident” in an attempt to kill her. These allegations gained further credence when it was revealed that the truck that had hit the car in which the Unnao rape victim, her family and lawyer were travelling to Rae Bareli had it’s number plates blackened out.Sengar, a four-time MLA from Bangermau, was arrested in April 2018 – for allegedly gangraping a girl, then a minor aged 17, in June 2017 on the promise that they will help her get a job – after the survivor and her family attempted to commit suicide by self-immolation outside Adityanath’s residence in Lucknow after failing to get rape charges framed against Sengar.Also read: Unnao Case Timeline: A Trajectory of Prolonged SufferingOn July 30, over mounting outcry over the accident, the UP state BJP president Swatantra Dev Singh claimed that Sengar had been suspended by the party earlier and “there is no change in his status”.However, this was claim was questionable, as a report in July 2018 in the Navbharat Times quoted the party’s former state president, Mahendra Nath Pandey, as saying that the BJP will decide to act against the MLA only after charges are proven.On July 31, the CBI booked Sengar and 10 others on murder charges in connection with the accident after taking over the case from the UP police on July 30.Arun Singh, the son-in-law of Fatehpur MLA and UP’s agriculture minister Ranvendra Singh, was also named in the CBI report. Singh, however, denied any involvement in the case and called it a “political controversy”.(With inputs from PTI)
