An award-winning Indian writer is on the run after five women who worked as cooks at a charity school he founded accused him of rape, police said yesterday.
Laxman Mane, 63, disappeared after the women filed complaints earlier this week, alleging that he had repeatedly assaulted them between 2003 and 2010, mostly on the school premises in Maharashtra.
“He has been on the run since the first case was filed at midnight on Monday,” said Amol Tambe, additional superintendent of police in the state’s Satara District, where Mane was living.
“A new complaint was filed on Wednesday. We have dispatched police teams to trace him,” Tambe said by telephone.
TRUST
Mane is executive president of the trust that runs the school for underprivileged children.
The case comes at a time when India is under fire for its treatment of women following the fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in New Delhi in December and a series of other sexual assaults.
Mane, who writes in the local Marathi language, was awarded the Padma Shri — one of India’s highest civilian awards — for his contribution to vernacular literature in 2009.
His autobiography titled Upara (Outsider) bagged the prestigious Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) award in 1981.
The women, aged between 30 and 35, claimed Mane raped them in the school’s office, storeroom and canteen as well as at a government-run guesthouse, after promising to make them permanent employees.
A clerk at the school has been accused of abetting.
CONSPIRACY
Mane’s family has dismissed the charges as baseless.
“Some of the employees of the school seem to have conspired to implicate my father in a false case,” Mane’s son Bhai was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India news agency.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was