Delhi cops extorted Rs 25k, kicked me on chest: Malda woman
"They (Delhi cops) showed the CCTV footage of me returning home with my children but not the footage of them thrashing me near Mangalam Hospital or torturing us at a police station," Sajnur Parveen, originally from Malda's Chanchal and who now stays in the slums of Shri Ram Chowk in East Delhi's Pandav Nagar with her six-member family, said at a press conference organised by the Trinamool Congress in Kolkata on Wednesday.
The woman and her family have been in the eye of a political storm after Delhi Police took the unusual step of publicly rebutting another state's CM's X post. Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee on Sunday evening had narrated on X the family's harrowing experience, calling the thrashing of a mother and her one-and-a-half-year-old son "terrible and atrocious". The family has now lodged a complaint against Delhi Police excesses at Kolkata's Pragati Maidan police station.
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Parveen claimed on Wednesday that her husband, Mukhtar Khan, was away at work when four cops came to their home last week. "They asked me to show our Aadhaar, which I was getting out, when they asked me where my husband was. They alleged we were Bangladeshis and warned us not to go anywhere before leaving with our papers," she added.
Four cops, two of them women, returned the next day (last Saturday) around 11.30 am. "They told us to accompany them and called us Bangladeshis again.
I was taking my daughter for her bath and my son was wearing only a T-shirt. I took him along with me in that state. The moment we reached a secluded spot (I could not say where exactly but they said it was near Mangalam Hospital), they started beating me and asked me my husband's whereabouts, all the time calling us Bangladeshis.
They slapped me twice when I protested," Parveen said.
She was then told to chant "Jai Shri Ram".
"I said I was a Muslim and could not do what they said, prompting them to kick me. I was already unwell and my son fell from my grip when they tried to snatch him away. Then they slapped him as well. He still has weals near his ear," Parveen recounted on Wednesday. "They demanded Rs 25,000 for letting me go. I gave them my husband's number, after which they let me talk to him. My husband called his mother, who arranged for the money.
They left us only after getting the money," Parveen said.
But that was not the end of their ordeal as cops and mediapersons landed at their door the same evening (Saturday). "They took us to a police station where they separated me from my husband. It was here that they asserted that anyone from Bengal was a Bangladeshi. They did not even let the children stay with me," she added.
"They let us go very late that night but told us we would not be spared if we dared talk about the incident in Bengal.
'Khel hoga (the Trinamool slogan of 'Khela hobe' in Hindi)', they told us," Parveen said at the press conference as Azmal Khan, her father-in-law, said they might be poor but were not "staging any drama".
CM Banerjee first posted about the incident on Sunday and Delhi Police waited till Tuesday to call the video "fabricated and politically motivated".
Trinamool latched on to the family's allegations, with state urban development minister and Kolkata mayor Firhad Hakim saying they had exposed the "conspiracy" to prove CM Banerjee wrong. The state would take the responsibility of all migrant workers and their families returning from other states, he added.
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