The Uttar Pradesh government on Saturday bulldozed the bakery of a Samajwadi Party leader in Ayodhya accused of raping a minor.

Moin Khan, the SP president of Bhadarsa Nagar, was arrested on July 30 along with his aide Raju Kumar in connection with the rape case. Both of them are currently in jail.

The local administration has also started surveying the properties of Bhadarsa Nagar Panchayat chairman Mohammad Rashid and local SP leader Jay Singh Rana in connection with the case.

The duo were booked on Saturday based on a written complaint by the mother of the 14-year-old girl who accused them of terrorising her and her daughter and pressuring them to withdraw the case.

A team led by additional district magistrate Aniruddh Pratap Singh reached the bakery in Purakalandar with two bulldozers on Saturday and razed the structure within two hours.

A team led by additional district magistrate Aniruddh Pratap Singh reached the bakery in Purakalandar with two bulldozers on Saturday and razed the structure within two hours. “The structure was razed because it was built after illegally filling a pond and for encroaching upon a revenue department’s land,” Singh said.

Manik Chand Singh, assistant commissioner of food and civil supplies, raided Moin’s bakery a few hours before it was demolished. “We have recovered adulterated food materials from the bakery and will file a case against him for playing with the health of the people,” he told reporters.

Moin and Raju were arrested after Ram Sewak Das, a resident of Pipari-Bharatkund village in Purakalandar, filed a gangrape case against them. The complainant, who owes allegiance to the BJP, had also informed chief minister Yogi Adityanath about the incident. Adityanath had raised this issue in the Legislative Assembly two days ago and blamed the senior SP leaders for not taking action against the accused.

The victim is two months pregnant and currently under treatment at a hospital in Ayodhya. Bikapur SP MLA Amit Singh Chauhan brought her mother to Lucknow on Friday to meet the chief minister.

Later, the mother told reporters that Rashid and Rana had visited the hospital at night a few days ago and threatened her and her daughter with dire consequences if they didn’t withdraw the rape complaint.

On Saturday, Ratan Sharma and Akhilesh Gupta, in charge of Purakalandar and Bhadarsa police stations in the district, were suspended for dereliction of duty.

“The chief minister has ordered an investigation into the source of the earnings of the
accused persons and their properties. We have come to know that there was no known source of income and they had constructed some buildings in the district on government land. They have also filled many ponds and constructed buildings there. We are preparing to deploy bulldozers in many more places in the next few days,” said an Ayodhya official who didn’t want to be named.

The victim was allegedly gang-raped three months ago by Raju and Moin, a campaigner for Samajwadi Party MP from Ayodhya Awadhesh Prasad.

“The rape victim’s mother told the chief minister that her husband had died two years ago. Since then, she and her four daughters have been working in agricultural fields. As her youngest daughter was returning home after work one day, Raju accosted her and told her that Moin had called her to the bakery to give her a job. The 14-year-old immediately agreed. But Moin and Raju raped her there and made a video of the incident,” the mother was quoted as saying.

“Since then, they had been blackmailing my daughter but I came to know about it when she became pregnant,” a source in the police quoted the mother as saying.

Without taking names, SP president Akhilesh Yadav on Saturday said the charge should be proved with the help of a DNA test.

“The guilty must be punished. But this should be substantiated by a DNA test. The officers involved in blaming someone should be punished if the DNA report is negative,” Yadav wrote in X.