New Delhi: A poster opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act outside the balcony led to the eviction of two female lawyers from their rented house after a door-to-door campaign led by Home Minister Amit Shah noticed the poster.
As soon as Amit Shah left the door-to-door campaign, a mob attacked the two female lawyers house, Scroll reports.
Surya Rajappan, one of the women, said the mob tried to forcibly enter their home. She added the members of the rally “started getting enraged and visibly agitated” as soon as they noticed the placard, and began to verbally harass and intimidate them with threats and derogatory and misogynistic remarks.
“To register our peaceful protest, my flatmate and I displayed a home-made handcrafted banner from our apartment balcony, just as the rally, led by Shah, was passing through our lane,” Rajappan told.
“I also raised certain slogans such as ‘We reject CAA, We reject NRC’,” she said.
In her statement on social media, Rajappan said: “A mob of around 150 people collected on the street below our apartment. They were evidently enraged and threatened by the simple act of two girls protesting peacefully to tackle what they perceived as an obvious ‘threat’ to their propaganda parade.”
She added the mob threatened to break in by banging the door violently if the women did not allow them in after tearing down the protest banner hanging from the women’s balcony.
Some members “forced their way up the stairs which lead to our residence and threatened to break down the door if we did not let them in”, she said.
The house owner, too, part of the mob had locked a common entrance that led to the staircase because of the which the women were unable to leave and instead called their friends for help, but even they were allegedly pushed around and threatened with violence.
“The fervent pleas of our friends that we should be allowed to peacefully leave the house were ignored by the frenzied mob,” Rajappan said.
“For 3-4 hours, we were trapped inside the house with an angry mob outside our house. In the meanwhile, our landlord informed us that we had been evicted from our residence.”
The woman’s father was let into the premises with a police officer after waiting for long hours, trapped inside the house.
The police then recorded the women’s complaint against the mob. The women left the house with their essential items after seven hours under the protection of the police.
“Over the course of the last 48 hours, we have feared for our lives and for our safety; our character and upbringing have also been questioned (as is now customary when any Indian woman speaks out against the BJP). We have also been accused of craving media attention – only for exercising our constitutional right to dissent peacefully.”