Cops using Dalit youth as scapegoat: Victims

She narrated the harrowing experience she had to undergo on Friday when policemen in plainclothes barged into her house and assaulted her 17-year-old son. The City Police Commissioner has formed a special police team to investigate the case. But it will take the team months to file its report. 

Sumathi, a 45-year-old Dalit mother, lives on the meagre income the family gets from doing coolie work. 

The crime Sumathi and several other women had committed at Kannagi Nagar was to give birth to boys, some lamented. 

When pressure from authorities build up on police to halt increasing cases of chain and mobile snatching in the city, the police raid the poorly maintained habitations at Kannagi Nagar and pick up youth who have nobody to argue their cases. Police then publish the figures of detection as an indicator towards their efficiency in crime prevention. Several youths who are arrested on false charges, return home as hardened criminals from the exposure they get from real criminals inside the Puzhal Prison. 

Sumathi’s elder son, Vignesh was also reportedly targeted by the police. The youth who works at Pudupet along with his father as a labourer told DT Next that he was also falsely implicated in a case. Vignesh was caught by the police for speeding on a two-wheeler. The police slapped a case of mobile snatching against him. 

“They asked me whether I had seen Puzhal Prison. When I told them that I have never visited the prison, they told me that it was time for me to visit Puzhal. They remanded me for 15 days. Before sending me to prison they tried to extract a false confession from me. They tied both my hands and hung me from the ceiling. I was forced to stand on my toenails,” claimed Vignesh, who is still fighting the case. 

He claimed the real mobile phone snatchers had paid the police money to let them off the hook and foist the case on somebody else. “Sadly, the police put the blame on me. Police recovered the stolen mobile phone from the culprits and asked me to confess that I had perpetrated the crime. I pleaded with them many times to prove my innocence. But they tortured me and extracted a false confession,” Vignesh said. 

The residents of Kannagi Nagar claim that it is a regular practice for the Chennai police to pick up innocent youth from the locality, file false cases against them and remand them to prison. They hope that a detailed investigation into the assault case would temporarily put an end to the police atrocities at Kannagi Nagar.