UP: COPS ON THE BACKFOOT
Police officers pay with transfers for taking on BJP leaders in the state
Shrestha Thakur, of the 2012 Provincial Police Service batch, was the officer responsible for evicting squatters from government land in Siana tehsil in Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr district. Posted as circle officer in Siana during the previous Samajwadi Party government, the young, nononsense police officer launched a campaign against the land mafia and battled vested political interests to eventually free up large areas of illegally occupied land. She got kudos for her good work.
But all that changed under the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government. Thakur has now effectively been punished for doing her job. During a routine check of vehicles at Siana’s main market on June 21, the officer made the mistake of booking Pramod Kumar, a local BJP leader riding a motorcycle without valid documents. She also charged the BJP leader with obstructing a government official from performing her duty.
Things moved pretty quickly after that. Kumar called Siana BJP chief Mukesh Bhardwaj,
who in turn informed local BJP MLA Devendra Singh about the police officer. Singh called the chief minister to complain against Thakur. On July 1, the officer was given her marching orders—to a suitably insignificant charge in Bahraich district.
This is not the first instance where a police officer in UP has suffered for taking on BJP leaders. On April 20, barely a month after the new government had assumed office, the party’s Saharanpur MP, Raghav Lakhanpal, and his supporters surrounded the official residence of district senior superintendent of police Luv Kumar. Lakhanpal and his men held Kumar’s family hostage for several hours and also vandalised the premises. All this to vent their ire after police stopped a procession of BJP workers on B.R. Ambedkar’s birth anniversary. As it did in Thakur’s case, Adityanath’s government posted Kumar out of Saharanpur.
However, there is one instance in which Adityanath stood with the police. On May 7, BJP legislator Radha Mohan Das Agarwal publicly admonished Charu Nigam, a woman IPS officer posted in the CM’s home district of Gorakhpur, for ordering a baton charge on women protesting the opening of liquor shops in the district. Images of the humiliated officer breaking down and weeping went viral on social media. The CM turned down Agarwal’s demand to transfer Nigam.
Keshav Prasad Maurya, BJP’s state president and deputy CM in the Adityanath government, says these face-offs featuring partymen and police officers are exaggerated in the media. Police officials disagree with his contention. S.R. Darapuri, a retired inspector general, claims police morale in UP is down since the BJP assumed power. This, police officers say, is reflected in the rising crime in UP—a 26 per cent jump from March to May compared to the same period last year.