MP cops break 80-yr-old woman’s bones

Bhopal: Eighty-year-old Kamlabai Mewade would like to meet the policemen who beat her up in her home on Friday. “They were younger than my grandsons. I want to ask them why they hit me,” the Phanda Kala resident, nursing a fractured arm, told TOI on Saturday. Her husband, an 83-year-old, sat quietly next to her, his legs bandaged. A photograph of four-five cops beating Kamlabai in her courtyard, carried by a Hindi daily, has gone viral. She remembers police shouting, “Buddhi pathrav karva rahi hai, aag lagwa rahi hai (old woman, you are provoking stone pelting and torching of vehicles),” as they barged into her home, lathis swinging. A few hundred metres away, police were under attack by a mob of farmers, sending jitters through the administration in Bhopal, barely 25km away. “I was sitting in my house along with my husband, sons and grandsons when police barged in. They accused me of hiding stone pelters inside my house. I denied, and said they were free to look around but they started beating me and my husband with sticks,” she told TOI on Friday evening. Her husband, Shivnarain, said, “I was lying on my cot when policemen entered our house. They started abusing us and assaulting us despite our pleading that we were not rioters.” Both their sons and four grandsons were also beaten up, the elderly couple says.Kamlabai alleges that police fired four to five tear gas shells into her house. “Our eyes are still inflamed and hurt a lot,” he said. “Our house is on a farm behind Phanda petrol pump. Chased by police, some protesters ran through the courtyard of my house and into the farms behind us, but neither I nor any member of my family was pelting stones at police. We were all sitting inside the house since we knew that the situation in the village was tense,” Kamlabai said. Police took seven members of the Mewade family — including Kamlabai — to Khajuri police station. Her grandsons — Jagdish, Santosh, Dharmendra and Laxman — were arrested.Kamlabai said, “They held back my two sons (Devi and Mohan) and sent me to Hamidia hospital with lady police officers. But they simply put me on a stretcher in the hospital and left. I was afraid and in shock. I approached a passerby, who took me to Hamidia police chowki. I requested them to send me back to my village but they said they could only call my third son, Gopal, who stays here.” Gopal took her to a private hospital where an X-ray showed she had fractured her left hand.That wasn’t the end of her ordeal. On Saturday afternoon, Kamala Bai and Gopal went to Dussehra Maidan to meet the CM and complain about the “police atrocities”. However, police turned them away. “When we reached the Maidan, some policemen told us that our case is being ‘sorted out’ at Khajuri. Some policewomen took my mother to a mahila thana. I followed them there and brought her back to our village,” said Gopal.Five members of the family are still in police custody — Devi and all the grandsons. “The chief minister said that he was sitting there to hear our problems. But the truth is nobody cares about the complaint of farmers or else they would have allowed us to meet him,” said Gopal.SP-North Arvind Saxena told TOI that he will investigate the complaint. “If anything like this has happened, I will order an inquiry. We’ll probe the reasons that led to the incident, if it did. And if any lapse is found, we will take action.”