Cong Spokesperson Gets Rape Threat For Daughter

Indian National Congress party's national spokesperson, Priyanka Chaturvedi, received a rape threat for her daughter on Twitter on Sunday. Before the rape threat, there was a fake meme, which said that Chaturvedi supports the accused of the Mandsaur gangrape of a young child, was doing the rounds on social media and WhatsApp that instigated a threatening response from a person who goes by the Twitter handle Jai Shree Ram.

The man in his tweet asked Chaturvedi to "send her daughter to him as he wants to rape her". Many on Twitter, including AAP incharge Ankit Lal and MP Sushmita Dev came out in Chaturvedi's support and condemned the tweet.

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Speaking to SheThePeople.TV, she said, "The tweet is not the bigger problem but the fact that an image containing a fake quote attributed to me which is creating this kind of anger and making people to react in the way they are is the bigger issue."

"When I saw it, I thought how could someone say something as pathetic as that and bring my daughter into it? They have been abusing me for as long as 2014 for being vocal but you can't bring my children into this entire discourse and speak so badly about them," she added.

Chaturvedi has been receiving calls from Madhya Pradesh where the gangrape happened, saying that they saw the image too. She says that this is a very synchronized method to silence people and spread an agenda which is so communal and divisive.

While the man who wrote the tweet has deleted it, Chaturvedi took screenshots of it and has sent them to the Mumbai Police for investigation.

While this may just be an image or a tweet for some people, in the current scenario, several mob lynchings and killings have happened because of these WhatsApp forwards. So it doesn't just affect a person virtually, but can have extreme repercussions in the real world as well.  "As a woman and a mother of two, this is just very saddening and it actually scares me after a limit," said Chaturvedi.

After the horrific gangrape of a girl in Mandsaur, Chaturvedi held a press conference where she held the government of MP accountable for not succeeding in providing safety to the women in the state. But somebody distorted it and put in the communal angle and attributed it to her.