Syed Khalique Ahmed | India Tomorrow
NEW DELHI, AUGUST 10—Three women, including a teenager, have alleged that police beat them up and sexually assaulted as well in the Bhajanpura police station of Northeast Delhi on the night of August 8.
The incident happened when 10 women, including Shaheen Khan, Shanno and the latter’s 17-year-old daughter went to the police to seek registration of an FIR in a case that happened two days earlier.
While the other women waited in the police station compound, the three went inside the police station. They are all residents of Subhash Mohalla of Ghonda, a locality in the northeast Delhi that witnessed India’s worst anti-Muslim violence in February this year.
In an interview to the Caravan magazine, they said the policemen not only refused to register the FIR, they severely attacked the women, including the teenager.
They also alleged that the policemen also sexually assaulted them. However, the police have denied all the allegations. Regarding registration of FIR, Ashok Sharma, Bhajanpura station house officer said he told the women that FIR can be registered only after an investigation. He denied that policemen assaulted the women or made sexual assault on them.
However, the women said that police officer was trying to cover up the issue and protect the guilty policemen.
Shaheen Khan alleged that while male cops tore her clothes and that of Shanno, they put their hands on the chest of the teenager.
Stating that the cops pulled her daughter by her hair and tried to take her to a dark corner of the police station, she alleged, “Meri beti ko galat-galat jaga haath lagaya” (They touched my daughter in wrong places). The 17-year-old teenager said that the cops misbehaved so much that she could not describe it with her own tongue.
Salim, husband of Shanno, told mediapersons that the women had gone to the police station to register an FIR in connection with the abuses their Hindu neighbours hurled on them in the intervening night between August 5 and 6 after foundation stone laying ceremony of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya. He said that his Hindu neighbours, while raising slogans of jai Shri Ram, abused the local Muslims and asked them to leave the locality. It was in this connection that the woman went to the police station to register an FIR.
According to Shaheen Khan, a complaint about it had been submitted to the police on August 6. But the police neither gave a signed copy of it nor register an FIR based on it. Their advocate Mahmood Pracha’s office also called up the police station. It was after this that the police called up the women to come with their complaint on August 8. However, the women went to the police station at 9 pm after they received the copy of the complaint from the advocate’s office. The officials at the police station gave a signed copy of the complaint alongwith the diary entry number but refused to register FIR.
Shaheen Khan said that Bhajanpura SHO Sharma told her that FIR would be registered only after inquiry. She said that while she was talking to Sharma for FIR, another policeman came from behind and snatched my phone. The policeman slapped her when she tried to take her back. When Shanno and her daughter came to her help, they were also beaten up and sexually assaulted.
