Dalit woman killed in AP, incident assumes political overtones

Guntur: The incident in which a Dalit woman was killed after she was allegedly roughed up and pushed under the wheels of a speeding truck at Tenali town by drunk miscreants, has now assumed political and caste overtones.

B Susheela, a 45-year-old housewife paid with her life on Monday night when she tried to rescue her teenaged daughter, who is a B Tech student, after seven drunken motor mechanics aged below 20 years attempted to molest her. Susheela`s husband, a municipal school teacher B Babu Rao has alleged that the police control room which is about 300 metres from the scene of the tragedy, did not respond to the commotion and that the police inspector with whom a complaint was lodged, played a partisan role. All the seven persons have been arrested. The incident occurred when Susheela and her daughter were returning home after shopping at around 10 pm, when the seven men who had just come out of a liquor bar owned by an affluent and upper caste Congress leader, began heckling them. The housewife shouted at them, which infuriated the seven men who allegedly roughed her up and pushed her under the wheels of a speeding truck, police said. Due to the public outcry after television news channels reported the incident, Guntur`s Superintendent of Police, initiated damage control measures by transferring the case to the Deputy Superintendent of Police and arresting the liquor bar owner`s son Nagaraju. When the incident took place, neighbours and passersby reportedly remained passive spectators and did not even bother to extricate the injured woman from under the wheels of the truck until her husband arrived, though observers have attributed it to the fear of hoodlooms of the notorious liquor bar owner, who is also a Congress leader. PTI