Bashaarat Masood
SRINAGAR: At a time when there is national outrage against assaults on women, the Congress has inducted Ghulam Ahmad Mir, a legislator accused in the Srinagar sex abuse scandal, into the Jammu and Kashmir Cabinet.
Though Mir was acquitted by a Special CBI court last year after the trial was shifted outside the state, a PIL in this regard is pending before the Jammu and Kashmir High Court.
Mir, who took oath on Tuesday, was inducted as Tourism Minister, and was reportedly taken on the insistence of the party’s state chief Saif-ud-din Soz even as several top Congress leaders both at the state and national levels opposed the move.
A legislator from Dooru Assembly constituency, Mir was arrested six years ago when his name surfaced in the case along with former minister Raman Mattoo. On June 20, 2006, Mir was arrested by the CBI. Two months later, the case was shifted by the Supreme Court to Chandigarh.
After spending five months in jail, Mir was released on bail by the Special CBI court in Chandigarh. Mir again successfully contested from Dooru Assembly constituency. On September 30, 2012, the Special CBI court in Chandigarh acquitted Mir along with three others after several witnesses turned hostile.
The PIL filed by the J&K High Court Bar Association is pending before the HC. A division bench of the HC, comprising Justice Hakim Imtiyaz Hussain and Justice Bashir Ahmad Kirmani, had given a split verdict. There has been no progress in the case since then.
“When the trial was shifted to Chandigarh, there was no hope of justice. We had apprehension that it has become a state managed trial and thus we held back,” Bar Association’s former general secretary G N Shaheen said.
Though the state had announced the rehabilitation of victims of the sex abuse scandal, no government help came; the victims finally turned hostile in the court. “The witnesses were pressurised and persuaded to turn hostile,” Shaheen said.
(Indian Express)
