By Ayush Tiwari & Vaishnavi Rathore
Like hundreds of protestors, Naureen was detained from Central Delhi on Sunday afternoon while peacefully protesting against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
But it is what happened after she was picked up, away from cameras and the public eye, that left her shocked.
Naureen was herded into a police prison van along with 16 protestors on the second day of protests against allegations of systemic vote rigging. Fifteen of these were women.
“They took us in and started hitting us individually,” Naureen, a member of the Revolutionary Workers Party of India, told Scroll.
She recounted watching female officials of the Delhi Police brutally assault a protestor, Aranya, a member of the Disha Students’ Organisation. “They laid Aranya down at the entry of the van, and one female constable started choking her,” Naureen told Scroll. “Another was hitting her with her elbows.” A police official then took her away, saying she needed medical attention.
The constables, Naureen said, went on to hit other women in the group – “on their breasts, and targeting their private parts”.
Scroll spoke to protestors in two prison vans, who recounted their harrowing experience of being driven for hours around Delhi before being taken 40 km away to a detention centre in Pandwalan Khurd in Najafgarh in South-West Delhi. Several of them have also recounted their ordeal on social media.
Hours before the alleged violent detentions, the Supreme Court had instructed the Delhi Police not to carry out “illegal detentions” of peaceful protestors, while hearing a petition against excessive use of force.
Lawyers criticised the police for arbitrarily detaining protestors and dropping them outside the city limits. “This ad hoc arbitrary police action is an easy substitute for legal procedures which would require the police to meet the high threshold stipulated by law for preventive detention or arrest,” said Soutik Banerjee, an advocate on record at Supreme Court. “It is a way to avoid accountability while acting as a political force and not a neutral one.”
Scroll contacted the Delhi Police asking for their response to the allegations. This story will be updated if they respond.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
