Fear of police stalks MP villagers
Local people allege police thrashed many of them mercilessly and also picked up three men on false charges
MANDSAUR: Fear stalks the narrow cemented roads of Bahi Parsavnath and Balaguda, the two Patidar-dominated Madhya Pradesh villages on the Mhow-Neemuch highway, where a police crackdown is on.
The two villages, which are 15km away from Mandsaur, were the epicentre of farmers’ protest where police firing on June 6 left five people dead after which angry farmers set fire to scores of trucks along the highway. The toll rose to six after an injured farmer died on Friday. It is about 3pm on Saturday when HT team reaches Bahi Parsavnath.
There is no curfew but the choupal, by the side of the village temple, is deserted. We see a young man peeping from a house nearby and call him. He walks towards us tentatively but relaxes a bit when we tell him we are from the media and want to know whether police made arrests in the village.
Slowly, people start appearing from all sides and surround us, eager to share details of police action in the last two days. “More than 50 men in blue uniform in four vehicles came to the village with two policemen from the local police station and started beating people mercilessly,” says a villager. The cops picked up three men, Kamlesh Patidar, the son of the local patel, Shivlal Patidar and Narendra Sharma on June 8, he says, refusing to be identified. “I fear police will target me if you write my name.” Patel is an honorific for a rich and influential man with a big land holding.
BLACK AND BLUE
“Police are making rounds of the village, two or three times a day. We are not venturing out in the open out of fear,” says a youth.
Mandsaur superintendent of police Manoj Kumar Singh said they were not targeting anyone but had detained people on the information they had and were tallying it with the video footage of the stone-pelting and vandalising mobs. A man who is a contractual teacher in a neighbouring district unbuttons his shirt to show us deep blue marks left on his back by police canes.
“This is how they are beating us. They dragged out some young kids from their homes but their mothers fell on the feet of RAF and they let go of the kids. It was a terrifying moment for all of us,” he says, recalling events of June 8, the first day security forces visited the village. Though some villagers are facing cases under the NDPS (narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances) act, Bahi Parsavnath is a peaceful village not given to violence, says another man.
Mandsaur and Neemuch, which are part of the Malwa belt in Madhya Pradesh, have swathes of poppy fields that produce the bulk of licensed opium in the country.