CHANDIGARH, Nov 17 — After a long wait, the CBI today filed a charge sheet against the Haryana Director-General of Police, Mr S.P.S. Rathore, in the Ruchika molestation case. The charge sheet was filed in the court of the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate, Mr A.K. Tyagi, the designated Special Court at Ambala for CBI cases in Haryana.

The case will come up for hearing tomorrow. The charge sheet was filed by a CBI team led by the DIG, Mr Rajiv Ranjan under Section 354 (outraging the modesty of a woman) of the Indian Penal Code. Punishment under the Section, which is a bailable offence, is imprisonment up to two years.

The case dates back to 1990 when Mr Rathore, then an Inspector-General of Police and the President of the Haryana Lawn Tennis Association, allegedly molested Ruchika, a 14-year-old schoolgoing daughter of a bank officer. Ruchika was a promising tennis player, who three years later committed suicide after she and her family was allegedly harassed by Mr Rathore.

According to UNI, the CBI has filed the charge sheet against Mr Rathore under Section 306, IPC, also. This section deals with offences related to abetment to suicide. Ruchika had allegedly committed suicide on December 29, 1993, after she and her family was harassed by Mr Rathore.

The complainant, Mrs Prakash, said at last Mr Rathore had met his nemesis. “This must have given some consolation to the soul of Ruchika, who had to leave this world even before she had attained her youth.”

She said if the judiciary had not heard the cries of Ruchika, the bureaucracy had gone all out to save Mr Rathore, who, she alleged, forced Ruchika to commit suicide by not only getting her expelled from school but also harassing her family to the extent of implicating her brother in several cases.

Mrs Prakash said nothing could describe the inhuman face of the bureaucracy better than what the then Chief Secretary of Haryana had written on Mr Rathore’s file after the death of Ruchika. The Chief Secretary had ordered that the complaint against Mr Rathore might be filed “because a considerable period had elapsed and the alleged aggrieved party had not agitated on the matter further nor it appeared to have taken any action to file a criminal complaint against him.”

She said the Chief Secretary’s order was akin to rubbing salt on our wounds. “While we had reposed confidence in the government, expecting a fair play, the bureaucracy misconstrued our trust to bail out Mr Rathore,” she added.

A spokesman of the Haryana Congress has demanded that Mr Rathore be immediately removed from his post in view of the CBI chargesheet against him. The spokesman accused the Chautala Government of protecting a “tainted” DGP for its own vested interests, even though the CBI, had earlier demanded the transfer of Mr Rathore from the DGP’s post.