'Kitne aadmi the': Congress leader Renuka Chowdhury kicks row over comment on gangrape

PATNA: While trying to bring attention to the Unnao rape and Kathua gangrape cases, Congress leader Renuka Chowdhury on Saturday kicked a row after invoking a dialogue from the famous Bollywood movie Sholay. "Koi mahila bahar nahi nikalti hai aaj kal. Aaj ke din jab ladki ghar se bahar nikalti hai aur uska balatakar ho jata hai, thaane mein jab jaate hain tab yahi poocha jata hai 'Kitne aadmi they. (No woman goes out of her house today. Today, when a girl steps out of the house and she is raped, she goes to the police and is asked "how many men were there')," she said at an event in Patna.

The Congress MP was commenting on the situation for women in the country and claimed that the state of law and order has worsened in the present time.

#WATCH: Congress' Renuka Chowdhury says 'Koi mahila bahar nahi nikalti hai aaj kal...Aaj ke din jab ladki ghar se bahar nikalti hai aur uska balatakar ho jata hai, thaane mein jab jaate hain tab yahi poocha jata hai 'Kitne aadmi theyy' pic.twitter.com/T2KeZsf2QY — ANI (@ANI) April 21, 2018

She is not the only women MP to have come under fire for her comments on rape. Earlier on Saturday, Bharatiya Janata Pary (BJP) MP Hema Malini had said that cases of rapes and crimes against women are receiving more publicity now. "Abhi jyada iska publicity ho raha hai aajkal. Pehle bhi shayad ho raha hoga maloom nahin tha. (Such cases are receiving more publicity now-a-days. These must have happened earlier too but there was no information about them," she said. However, she added that such issues will be given importance and assured that action will be taken.

There has been a massive uproar across the country over the recent string of rape crimes against minors including horrific incidents from Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua, Uttar Pradesh's Unnao and Gujarat's Surat.

While in Kathua, an eight-year-old girl from a nomadic community was brutally tortured, raped for weeks before being killed, in Surat, the body of the minor girl with 86 injury marks was found. her post-mortem had revealed that the girl was raped and tortured for at least eight days, and was later strangled to death.

Unnao is also in the news after a victim alleged that she was raped by BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar. She had moved court seeking to include the MLA's name in the rape case after which her father was booked by the police under the Arms Act. Soon after he died in jail with a post-mortem report suggesting serious injuries on his body.