Rape accused and former Union minister Chinmayanand is enjoying air-conditioned comfort in custody while the rape complainant, arrested on blackmail charges, is ill and untreated in prison, her father alleged on Saturday.

A source at the Lucknow hospital where Chinmayanand has been admitted to a private cabin acknowledged that all the private cabins at the hospital are air-conditioned. The official asked not to be identified.

Chinmayanand — a three-time BJP lawmaker who the party claims is “at present” not its member — spent the first three days in a Shahjahanpur jail after his September 20 arrest and is now into his sixth day in the hospital.

Following his September 23 admission to the Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, he spent two days in the ICU before being shifted to the private cabin in the cardiology department.

“The tormentor of a girl is in an air-conditioned room at a hospital and the victim is in jail,” CPM leader Subhashini Ali, who had met the complainant in jail on Thursday, told reporters on Saturday.

“The state government is protecting the baba (Chinmayanand) and trying to break the spirit of a girl who is fighting a powerful criminal.”

The complainant’s father told reporters in Shahjahanpur: “We have learnt that Chinmayanand’s aides are meeting him freely in the hospital room and that he continues to enjoy all the luxuries he is used to. The government wants to keep him in hospital till he gets bail.”

A Shahjahanpur court will hear the bail applications of both Chinmayanand and the woman on September 30.

“My daughter is unwell. She looked frail and was running a temperature when we met her in jail on Thursday. The jail authorities are not providing her treatment,” the father added.

The hospital source insisted that no outsider had met the monk in the cabin.

A jail department official in Lucknow said he had no information that the rape complainant was ill. The Shahjahanpur prison authorities could not be contacted.

Amit Agrawal, chief medical superintendent at the Sanjay Gandhi Institute, told reporters on Saturday that Chinmayanand would remain at the hospital “till he gets well”.

“He has a urinary infection. He will remain at the hospital till all his medical parameters are normal,” Dr Agrawal said. He declined to say what facilities he was receiving.

Chinmayanand had on September 22 complained about chest pain in jail. The Shahjahanpur doctors who examined him concluded that the long-time diabetes patient had high blood pressure.

He was brought to the Lucknow hospital on Monday. On Wednesday evening he was shifted from the ICU to the private cabin after his angiography report showed no clogged arteries.

The complainant, a 23-year-old student at a law college Chinmayanand operates from his Shahjahanpur ashram, has alleged the monk filmed her bathing in her hostel and blackmailed her into submitting to rape for over a year. She says he threatened to kill her when she decided to resist.

Chinmayanand has, however, been charged not with rape but only with molestation, criminal intimidation and sexual exploitation through the use of his authority as law college head.

The woman has been charged with blackmailing the monk with sex videos, allegedly threatening to circulate them if he did not pay up Rs 5 crore. Three of her male college mates too have been arrested on the same charge.