The Haryana Government on Thursday put on hold the cash reward and felicitation of the Rohtak sisters, Aarti and Pooja, for fighting back alleged molesters in a bus.
This, after a new video surfaced portraying the siblings as bullying a boy a month ago in a park.
The Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar had earlier announced that his government will felicitate the sisters on Republic Day.
However, the charges of molestation in a bus against three men as alleged by two Rohtak sisters took a curious turn with a new video that apparently questions the credibility of the charges.
The new video relates to a month-old, unrelated incident involving the the sisters - Aarti and Pooja, portraying them as bullies.
It shows the two sisters beating up a boy in Rohtak's Huda City Park during an altercation as witnessed by two men, Virender Dhankar and Yogeshwer.
They said, "The girls (sisters) abused and tore off a boy's clothes after he asked them why they were wasting their time in the park instead of attending college," Hindustan Times reported.
Meanwhile, six women co-passengers who travelled in the bus told the police that the three accused men were innocent and instead were victims of the sisters' bullying attitude.
The sisters had allged that the three men - Mohit, Deepak and Kuldeep - molested them and had therefore thrashed the trio.
However, the six women in their affidavits filed at Rohtak police station gave an entirely different version of the incident.
One of the six women, Vimala, from Sonipat's Garhi Sisana village said she had asked Kuldeep to buy two tickets for her and another woman who was sick, The Times of India reported.
But, when Kuldeep boarded the bus and saw one of the sisters sitting in the seat allotted to the sick woman, he asked her to vacate it. Impulsively, the sisters got aggressive and started thrashing Kuldeep, according to Vimla.
"The two girls were already sitting on seat No. 8 which was allotted to the ill woman. He requested the girls (sisters) to vacate the seat for the sick woman and even showed the ticket to them. Then, he told the sick woman to sit on some other seat but the girls became abusive," Vimla claimed in the affidavit.
"The girls (sisters) then attacked him with belts from behind. They also kicked him...The man jumped out of the bus when it slowed down near a speed breaker. The girls also followed him for some distance," she mentioned in her affidavit.
But when the police arrived at the scene, the girls (sisters) named both Mohit and Deepak along with Kuldeep, said Vimla, adding that the other two men "had nothing to do with the incident."
The sisters however claimed that the eyewitnesses have filed the affidavits to pressurize them to withdraw the case.
The new twist in the Rohtak sisters' story has strengthened the views of those who have started questioning the credibility of the sisters' statement against the men in the video.
The turn of events in the case also prompted the Haryana Government to reinstate the driver and conductor of the Haryana Roadway bus, in which the incident happened on Friday.
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