Cops 'abduct' migrant family, seek 'ransom'

[Desi Cartman]

FARIDABAD/NEW DELHI: Home minister P Chidambaram's strong statement on Sunday against Bangladeshi migrants may signal a resolve of the establishment to do away with illegal inhabitants but Delhi Police's "cleansing drive" often smacks of a witchhunt. An inquiry has been ordered into an incident where Delhi Police personnel allegedly picked up some people from Faridabad —which is beyond their jurisdiction — and demanded money to let them go. At 3.44am on January 6 —the victim looked at the watch on hearing loud knocks at the unearthly hour — masked persons claiming to be Haryana Police personnel picked up Malati Patra from house number A/187 Gali 11, Shivdurga Vihar, Faridabad. Malati, who's from South 24 Parganas in West Bengal, said another Muslim family living in the house were also taken away. The Muslim family also claims to be from a village in North 24 Parganas. In her letter to Chidambaram recounting her night of ignominy, Malati wrote, "I was woken up by a woman police holding a baton over my head. In the cold morning neither the small children nor the adults were allowed to wear our woollens. I was in my night clothes.... The woman stripped me and asked me to change in front of her. We were asked not to make any noise and the neighbours were asked to remain indoors and never to speak of the incident to anyone..." Malati has a ration card issued by the Haryana government. The head of the other family had a voter ID card and PAN card. Now back at her Faridabad residence, Malati told TOI on Sunday that the cops kept saying they would be taken to Faridabad police station but the jeep drove towards Delhi. "When I tried to protest that they were taking us away from Faridabad, they said, 'you talk too much'," she said. In her letter, Malati has also alleged that the cops after reaching the police station asked her co-tenant to cough up Rs 75,000 for securing his and his family's release. Nobody was allowed to make any calls, she added. "They suddenly noticed my red and white bangles and sindur that married Hindu women wear. Initially they said I was faking my identity... one among them caught my accent and decided it would be safer to let me go," Malati's letter reads. She recalls the nervous attempts of the policemen then to ingratiate her. "They offered me tea, even cigarettes and pan and then said 'it's too early to get you milk'. I refused everything and taking the Rs 30 they had given me, left. One of them came along and told me to catch a bus to Kashmere Gate and then another one to Badarpur. It was only after I reached the main road that some locals told me that I wasn't in Faridabad but in Shahdara," Malati says. While Malati has returned, some of her co-tenant's family members — including two children aged 5 and 3 years — are still in custody, she writes in her letter. The distraught woman who works as a domestic help, says it has become difficult to face the neighbours and her husband has started raising doubts about her character. When TOI called them, both SHO Shahdara Mohd Ashrat Khan and DCP (northeast) Surinder Yadav denied the incident. "A woman had come but there was nothing like that...", Yadav said. Khan said: "Nothing like this happened in my police station. Large parts of Trans-Yamuna are locally referred to as Shahdara so it could have been Seelampur, Welcome or Vishwasnagar." Delhi Police's ACP (operations), L R Meena, though admitted that an inquiry is on. "Our men are saying they were picked up from Seelampur, not from Faridabad. We are ready to suspend the guilty but let the inquiry be over. We will release the remaining people tomorrow. Justice will be done." Sources say Malati and others have managed to identify only one person as one of the cops who came that night — a man with "big protruding eyes". Questions have been asked time and again about the legitimacy of Delhi Police's drive against "Bangladeshi" migrants — sometimes by people within the system. Most of them however have fizzled out, largely because the victims have never spoken up. Do the police pick the real Bangladeshis? More importantly, what is the point of a drive in the name of national security when a few thousand rupees are enough for a suspected illegal migrant to go scot-free.

reminds me of "delhi police aap ke saath aap kay liye ............" and I used to add "appki jaib kaatnay ke liye" :orderorder:

[DomainK]

Forget Delhi Police.....even Mumbai Police, who are supposed to be very efficient, have done that. A colleague of mine once had some trouble with one of his neighbors. He bribed a couple of cops who picked up the guy, took him to some abandoned building, beat him up badly till his wife came and paid them two lakhs. My colleague tells that story with some arrogance as if that was an achievement.