New Delhi: “I thought I was seeing a dream!” This was how the Delhi gang-rape victim’s father felt when he saw Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul at his doorstep.
The 53-year-old recalled yesterday that Congress MP Mahabal Mishra repeatedly telephoned him on Saturday evening to say “a very big leader” was planning to visit his house.
When the first of the telephone calls came, the father, a porter at the domestic terminal of the Indira Gandhi International Airport, had gone to a hospital because he had fever.
But he got no clue as to who the “very big leader” could be.
“I returned to my house at about 5.15pm... Some 45 minutes later, there was a knock at the door. When we opened it, we saw Soniaji, Rahulji and Renukaji (Renuka Chowdhury).”
“I thought I was seeing a dream,” the man said, adding he could not believe that the Congress president had actually come to meet the devastated family.
Eventually, the Gandhis ended up spending more than an hour in the crammed two-room house, located in an area with narrow streets that can’t take
large vehicles.
The mother-son duo spoke at length, and sympathetically, with the still grieving parents of the 23-year-old woman who was brutally gang-raped in a moving bus on December 16. The incident triggered unprecedented street protests here and across India.
The young trainee physiotherapist finally passed away in a Singapore hospital after 13 agonising days. All six accused are under arrest, with five of them possibly set to face death sentence. The sixth is a minor.
Congress spokeswoman Renuka Chowdhury on Saturday gave a detailed account of the Gandhis’ visit. Yesterday, members of the family told IANS that Sonia Gandhi promised to do her best to get them an MIG (Middle Income Group) flat in Dwarka area, not far from their present house.
IANS
