CBI to probe girls’ confinement in ashram
NEWDELHI: The Delhi high court on Wednesday directed the CBI to investigate the alleged illegal confinement of girls and women in a north Delhi ashram where they were kept in “animal-like” conditions behind metal doors in a “fortress” surrounded by barbed wire.
A bench of acting chief justice Gita Mittal and justice C Hari Shankar asked the CBI director to constitute a special investigation team (SIT). The court asked the CBI to investigate the FIRS lodged in Delhi against the ashram and its founder-cum-spiritual head Virender Dev Dixit.
“The CBI shall proceed expeditiously in the matter and ensure that steps in accordance with the law be taken at the earliest,” the court said. Directions were also issued to the institute and its founder to produce on Thursday the full details of every inmate lodged in the ashram and about the whereabouts of one of the girls missing from the institute.
The court also set up a committee, also comprising Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal, to inspect the premises of the institute.
The committee, comprising lawyers Ajay Verma and Nandita Rao, gave a report detailing the “horrible” living conditions of the over 100 girls and women. The inmates seemed to be under the influence of drugs, it said. The panel members also said they were assaulted by the institute staff and kept locked up for nearly an hour and were reportedly res- cued only after additional police force was called.
The panel also told the court that there was an adjoining building where male staff were being housed and that there was a possibility that there were minor boys there and that it was probably connected to the women’s building by an underground tunnel. The bench ordered that the adjoining building be also inspected by the panel as well.
Maliwal told HT that when she inspected the ashram there were bunch of letters addressed to the head of the institute with sexually explicit content. “I suspect the girls were forced to write them. There were many used injections and medicine bottles,” she said.