Supreme Court declines to interfere in alleged rape case against Arunachal CM Pema Khandu

The Supreme Court today declined to entertain in a petition filed by a woman from Arunachal Pradesh alleging rape against the state’s Chief Minister Pema Khandu..A Bench of Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi and Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna remarked that it cannot interfere in an incident that happened in 2008..The Court stated in its order that the petitioner is free to approach the jurisdictional High Court for redressal of her grievances..The Court also granted liberty to the petitioner to approach appropriate authorities for police protection..The woman approached the Supreme Court after the police and the Chief Judicial Magistrate declined to entertain pleas to register a criminal complaint against the alleged perpetrators. .The petitioner states that she was 15 years old at the time of the alleged incident. As recounted in her petition, she was working in a Public Call Office in Arunachal Pradesh at the time. A man is alleged to have lured her into a meeting under the pretext of helping her get a government job..The petition states that she met three others during this meeting, including Pema Khandu who introduced himself as an Army colonel. The two other persons named in the petition are a teacher at a Government school and an Assistant Mineral Development Officer at Ziro..The petitioner has submitted that she was given soft drinks laced with drugs during the meeting. While she was unconscious, the four men are alleged to have raped her..All the while, the petitioner submits that she was not aware of the real identities of the alleged offenders, even if she had understood that they were powerful people. It was only in 2012, after seeing his photographs in the newspaper, that she came to identify Pema Khandu as the (then) Tourism Minister for Arunachal Pradesh..Senior Advocates Kapil Sibal and Krishnan Venugopal and advocates MS Vishnu Shankar and Sriram Parakkat appeared for the petitioner..Read the order below. .Bar & Bench is available on WhatsApp. For real-time updates on stories, Click here to subscribe to our WhatsApp.