NEW DELHI – The Supreme Court on Thursday said Delhi Police has gone berserk as it took suo motu cognizance of a senior police officer slapping a young woman so hard that she began bleeding from the ear. The woman protesting against the rape of a five-year-old.
“The Delhi Police Commissioner shall file an affidavit and explain the unprecedented deployment of force against demonstrators who were protesting against rape of a minor. It must be indicated why so much force was used by the police in slapping a young girl that she started bleeding from the ear,” the court said.
Refusing to accept Delhi Police’s action against the errant ACP, a bench of Justices G S Singhvi, Ranjana Desai and Arvind Bobde asked the Commissioner to explain the accountability that needed to be fastened on senior officers for such behaviour from a disciplined force.
The Delhi incident and another in UP, where a DSP brutally pushed an unarmed 65-year-old lady protesting against another alleged rape and murder involving a six-year-old in Aligarh’s Nagla Kalar area, left both the bench and amicus curiae – Harish Salve and U U Lalit – ashamed, angered and anguished.
“Has your government no shame left,” the bench asked UP’s additional advocate general Gaurav Bhatia and wondered aloud – “what was the reason for the dastardly behaviour of the DSP against a lady who was fit to be his mother and whether the police across the country had no respect for women. Unless a surgery from top to bottom is done, there cannot be any change in the situation. These incidents would keep repeating across the country.”
It also asked the senior-most officer of UP to file an affidavit and “explain the stand of the state on the incident at Aligarh where an officer of DSP rank behaved in a most dastardly manner and pushed a 65-year-old unarmed lady without any rhyme or reason”. Both the affidavits, would have to be filed within a week.
If the court was pained by the disrespect shown by police to women, it was angered by the total lack of fear of law among police since the two incidents in Delhi and UP happened despite wide media coverage of the adverse view it had taken of two earlier incidents – one at Tarn Taran in Punjab and another in Patna – and started monitoring implementation of police reforms as ordered by the apex court seven years ago.
