SC Stays Suspension of Kuldeep Sengar's Life Sentence for Raping Minor; Tripura Student Stabbed in Dehradun by Racist Attackers Dies; Dhaka Rejects India's Criticism of Hostility to Minorities
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December 29, 2025
Sidharth Bhatia
Holding that “substantial questions of law” needing examination have arisen in the matter, the Supreme Court today stayed the Delhi high court’s order from last week suspending former Uttar Pradesh legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar’s life sentence for raping a 17-year-old girl in 2018 and granting him bail pending resolution. While the high court said that the former BJP MLA for Bangarmau was convicted for aggravated penetrative sexual assault on a child despite the fact that MLAs are not ‘public servants’ in this context – and thus the aggravated charge would not apply – Chief Justice of India Surya Kant questioned this interpretation today. “If this interpretation is accepted, a constable or patwari will be public servant but MLA/MP will not be and get exempted,” LiveLaw quotes him as saying.
Sengar was also convicted and sentenced to ten years’ prison in connection with the custodial death of the survivor’s father. Her aunt, her uncle and her lawyer were killed when a truck rammed into their car – she needed to be put on a ventilator for six months – but a court acquitted Sengar in this matter in 2019. She told the BBC’s Hindi service recently that she feared for her life after the high court delivered its order.
Anjel Chakma, a 24-year-old MBA student from Tripura at the Uttaranchal University in Dehradun who earlier this month was stabbed by assailants who called him and his brother Michael ‘Chinese’ among some slurs against northeasterners, succumbed to his injuries late last week. Five people have been arrested but the man who allegedly stabbed Chakma was absconding as of Monday morning, Umanand Jaiswal reports. Pradyut Deb Barman, leader of the Tipra Motha that is allied with the BJP in Tripura, said that “what happened to Anjel could happen to any of us. We cannot accept being treated as second-class citizens”.
Bangladesh’s foreign ministry yesterday rejected India’s criticisms of the “unremitting hostility against minorities” in its country aired after the lynching of two Hindu men recently. These “do not reflect the facts”, Dhaka said, alleging that “there are systematic attempts to portray the isolated incidents of criminal acts as systemic persecution of the Hindus” and to “incite common Indians against Bangladesh” and its diplomatic missions.
Even as the rejoinder brings into sharper focus this bone of contention between the two sides – the issue of violence against members of Bangladesh’s minority communities – the Dhaka police claimed that two ‘primary’ suspects in the murder of youth leader Osman Hadi had escaped across the Indo-Bangladeshi border into Meghalaya. Speculation that Hadi’s attackers had fled to India had inflamed anti-India sentiment on Bangladesh’s streets. However, the Hindustan Times yesterday quoted an unnamed Meghalaya police officer and a Border Security Force official as denying that any suspects in Hadi’s killing had been traced in India.
Amid this diplomatic tension and anger among Bangladeshis, it probably does not help matters when leaders such as the BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari say things like ‘a lesson must be taught’ along the lines of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza or Operation Sindoor, during a protest against Hindu garment worker Dipu Das’s lynching in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh. The Israel-Hamas war has killed 70,000 Palestinians per the Gaza health ministry, reduced much of the coastal strip to rubble and caused some of its districts to slip into conditions of famine, prompting some scholars to call Tel Aviv’s military campaign a genocide.
India’s protests against incidents like Das and Rajbari resident Amrit Mondal’s killings are also undermined by the various incidents of violence against its own minorities, like in the recent case of Anjel and Michael Chakma, the recurring attacks on Christians during Christmas time and those against Muslims. So does the exclusionary rhetoric by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat: his assertion that
