The Kolkata Police have come under severe attack from the National Commission for Women and the civil society for “dereliction” of duty and “insensitivity” towards the victim of the South Calcutta Law College gangrape case.
Archana Majumdar one of the members of the NCW charged the police with “non-cooperation” alleging, the visiting team of the quasi-judicial authority “not only not allowed to videograph the crime scene but also failed to provide the whereabouts of the victim.”
Saying that the entire report will filed in details to the appropriate authority Majumdar said, “when we entered the college we found two rooms entirely sealed and the two staircases also closed, the lift was probably switched off, when the NCW team wanted to video graph the crime scene the police prevented us and said they would seize the instruments if a videography was done.” A First Year law student of the elite South Calcutta Law College was allegedly gangraped by two TMC student leaders and Manojit Mishra an alumnus and a practicing lawyer — allegedly “very close to some top TMC leaders including MPs, MLAs and ministers.”
Referring to the Sunday’s development NCW member Majumdar also alleged that when the NCW “which too is an investigating and
quasi-judicial authority asked for the whereabouts of the
victim girl, the Deputy Commissioner of Police concerned would not oblige, though she had given the phone number of her parents, when we could not contact her the nodal officer said that the victim was called for recording her statement and was dropped somewhere after 12 am — in the night.”
The senior officer also said that “she was not aware of her whereabouts, it is gross negligence on her part concerning the gravity of the situation, at a time it has become a national news, she runs a great security risk and the police let her go without any security at the dead of night, this statement itself from the senior officer is reckless, negligent and amounts to dereliction, and if the officer is lying to the NCW about the victim then also she is guilty of misleading a statutory authority.” The NCW had not been able to contact the victim girl till reports last came in.
Elsewhere a section of lawyers and members of the civil society too attacked the police for trying to mask the identities of the accused — all leaders of the Trinamool Congress students’ arm TMC Chhatra Parishad — in the gangrape case.
In an apparent bid to put the accused persons in an advantageous position and confound the victim during judicial scrutiny at the trial stage
the police have mentioned initials and not the names of the felons in the First Information Report, lawyers said.
The names of “Manojit Mishra, Pramit Mukhopadhyay and Jaib Ahmed have been referred to as ‘M’, ‘J’ and ‘P’, this has been done to vitiate the case to the prejudice of the victim in later stage of trial,” said some advocates. “If the victim had named the three accused persons in her statement there was no reason for the police to mention the initials instead of the full names, it was wrong on the part of the police to mention just the initials, this was perhaps done with the long-term factors of the case in mind as also the political clout of the accused persons,” Firdous Shamir a High Court advocate said.
Meanwhile, a senior IPS officer on Sunday said that the CCTV footages seized from the site had confirmed the allegations of the victim girl who had complained that she was held forcibly back by the two students when she tried to run out of the college.
The police had arrested a fourth person, the security guard in the case for allegedly ignoring the victim’s frantic appeal to open the gates and save her from the felons.