'My girl will fight till the end', says mother of complainant in Tejpal case

New Delhi: The mother of the complainant in the Tarun Tejpal sexual assault case has said that her daughter will not give in under intense media scrutiny and will fight till the end. She was quoted by the prominent Bengali daily 'Ebela' as saying that Tejpal is resorting to antics when faced with a charge of sexual assault.

Tejpal on Friday said that he was not running away from the law and was willingly going to join the investigations and put his point of view in the case in Goa. He was being accompanied by Goa Police officials on his way to Goa.

"The fight has just begun," the mother of the alleged victim told the daily. "Everyone is seeing what he's doing... First he apologized, and then he blamed my girl, questioned her character/intention, now he's running away from police. I won't say much now... everyone can see," she said.

"My girl will fight till the end," she said.

Meanwhile, the woman called upon political parties "to resist the temptation to turn a very important discussion about gender, power and violence into a conversation about themselves".

"Suggestions that I am acting on someone else's behest are only the latest depressing indications that sections of our public discourse are unwilling to acknowledge that women are capable to making decisions about themselves for themselves," she said in a statement.

"Now that we have a new law that broadens the definition of rape, we should stand by what we fought for. We have spoken, time and again, about how rape is not about lust or sex, but about power, privilege and entitlement. Thus this new law should be applicable to everybody - the wealthy, the powerful, and the well connected - and not just to faceless strangers. As seen by some of the responses to this case, instances of familial and custodial rape present doughty challenges to even the most adamantine feminists," she said.

Her mother said she was seeing Tejpal "in a new light after this incident."

"Never expected him - of all people - to do this," she said. "My girl was completely shattered and broken after the incident... but she is very strong. She really looked up to Tejpal - almost as a father figure," she said.