At 6.30 am when Abhi Kapur (name changed), a resident of Sector 46 in Chandigarh, stepped out of his first floor home for a walk in the park in front, he was almost immediately nabbed by 2-3 policemen in plainclothes.
“I asked what my fault was, but immediately realised that being out in the park was a violation of the lockdown. I kept pleading with them that I was apologetic and that I should be let off to return to my wife and two-year-old infant,” he says.
Kapur was taken to what he remembers as a ‘blue, open van with two rows of seating in the front’, parked at the front of the park.
“This was the first morning during the lockdown that I had ventured out of home as I was feeling unwell. During the initial days of the lockdown, I had seen many policemen with their families walk and sit in the park. Whenever a police van would come, there would be siren and people would go in. But that day it was a special drive for the police,” says Kapur.
He was asked to get into the van but he did not want to for it already had some 20 people, many without masks squatting in close contact with each other.
It was then that the lashings started. Four blows came down on the back of his hands, his body, thighs and butt. Terrified, he climbed in.
Kapur’s mind was turmoiled by the shame of the lathi charge as though he was a common criminal. He was further scared that sitting close to so many others—many without face masks—he had compromised himself to contracting the virus.
Squatting in the truck, Kapur also saw that an elderly couple had been picked up. The lady was made to sit in the front but the man was squatting at the back. Kapur tried to get his phone out to speak to his wife, but a policeman warned that it would be snatched.
The truck lurched around the Sector, to the other parks, and picked up more men. “One man was simply standing in front of his home and was picked up. He kept shouting that he was a government official,” Kapur remembers.
An hour later, the truck finally spilled out its occupants in the front lawn of the Sector 34 police station. They were made to sit with requisite distancing and those who did not have a mask were given one.
“Throughout our wait, the police was abusive, telling us that what they had done was mild and the UP Police was doing far worse things. ‘Do you want the Army to be called in’, asked one.”
Kapur remembers clearly that in the midst of this, an Inspector called Jarnail Singh, calmed him and explained the nature of the case against him (violation of Section 188).
Sometime later, a lady police officer in plainclothes appeared and introduced herself as the in-charge of the police station. “She said to me that since ‘we cannot touch you, lathis are the only way. You should forget this day as a bad day’.”
To those who dared ask her why this was happening, she said that people had been tagging senior police and administrative officials on social media with pictures of lockdown offenders, causing their bosses to ask why these were not being picked up.
The officer in question is Neha Yadav, Assistant Superintendent of Police, who is in-charge of six thanas, including the one where the truck was brought on May 13.
She says that there is no police vehicle of the kind described that can take in 33 people. “For bigger groups, we use the bus in which the requisite distancing is maintained,” she said.
Her team she says is under tremendous pressure—on the job from 6 am to past 10 pm. “Additional pressure is being created by constant postings on social media about people breaking the lockdown norms. Yet, whenever we take on someone for violating a norm, we are threatened that the matter will go up and that we will made to pay. To that I say, do whatever is possible.”
Yadav says that people living in huge Kothis have no reason to come out of their boundaries to walk. “These are good societies. How would they feel if the administration named and shamed them,” she says.
She adds that on that particular day, the police had made a number of rounds to pick up all those violating the lockdown, but at no point was their safety compromised.
Meanwhile, Kapur has written to the Director General of Chandigarh Police saying, “I feel badly harassed and I’m in mental shock due to this incident as I and my entire family may now be exposed to the infection by Chandigarh Police.”
