Police take 24 hours to file a case
NEWDELHI: It took the police nearly 24 hours to register an FIR after a mob of at least 30 people participating in the fortnight-long Kanwar Yatra wrecked a car that had allegedly grazed one of them in west Delhi’s Moti Nagar early on Tuesday evening.
The police said the two people in the car attacked by the ‘kanwariyas’ -- videos of the incident went viral on social media on Tuesday night -- did not want any legal action. On Wednesday, as anger grew over the brazen attack and the suspects apparently going scot free, the police decided to take suo motu cognisance and register a case of wrongful restraint and mischief causing damage. The maximum prescribed punishment for these offences is two years in jail, but the guilty, if caught, could also be let off with a fine. The group of ‘kanwariyas’ used baseball bats, hockey sticks and stones to smash the Hyundai i10 car on the busy Najafgarh Road, barely 300 metres from the Moti Nagar police station. Vijay Kumar, deputy commissioner of police (west), said that mobile phone videos and CCTV footage of the incident would be examined.
The DCP said there were three policemen at the spot, and said that they “did their best to pacify” the ‘kanwariyas’, but eyewitnesses suggested that they did not intervene.
The ‘Kanwar Yatra’ is an annual pilgrimage of devotees of Shiva, who march to Haridwar, Gaumukh, Gangotri and Sultanganj to fetch ‘holy water’ from the Ganga, and then walk with the water in pots, called ‘kanwars’. The journey is often accompanied by heavy traffic jams across cities that fall in the path of the yatra, and with incidents of violence by unruly mobs that have been known to resort to arson and destruction of public property.
Eyewitnesses of Tuesday’s incident said that such was the “intent and aggression” of the perpetrators that the car’s occupants ran for their lives and hid in the nearby metro station even before the onslaught began. For about 20 minutes, the witnesses added, the ‘kanwariyas’ smashed and overturned the car, being driven by a woman, damaged two other vehicles nearby in the process, and pelted stones at people recording the violence on mobile phone cameras.
“The car was taking a U-turn at the time. The ‘kanwariya’ who had been hit caught up with the car and started banging on the windows, asking the occupants to come out,” said Junaid, who works at a garments shop near the scene of the crime. He said some passersby tried to intervene, but other ‘kanwariyas’ rushed to the vehicle. The DCP said the incident escalated after one of those inside the car slapped the injured ‘kanwariya’.