On 6 July, Mohammad Nasir Khan, a resident of Gali Number 8, in northeast Delhi’s North Ghonda neighbourhood, received a call from the Bhajanpura police station. The official on the line asked Nasir to come to the station the next day. Nasir had suffered a serious gunshot wound to the eye during the carnage that ripped through Delhi’s North East district in the last week of February. During the course of multiple interviews over seven weeks, Nasir told us that it was one of his neighbours, Naresh Tyagi, who shot him during the violence, and that since 12 March, he had been trying to file a complaint against Naresh at the Bhajanpura station. He repeatedly said that not only were the police refusing to register an FIR against his complaint, he was also being threatened regularly by Naresh, his family and associates, not to file the complaint.
On 7 July, Nasir said, he met an assistant sub-inspector Rajeev Sharma, who took down his complaint, asked him a series of questions and heard out Nasir’s allegations against Naresh. The next evening, a constable from the Bhajanpura station, Rohit Kumar, came to Nasir’s house. When Nasir asked him the reason for his visit, Rohit said he had come to hand over a copy of an FIR—number 64 of 2020—related to Nasir’s complaint, and “to take his statement.” Nasir said that Rohit noted Nasir’s statement, and also told him that a chargesheet had already been filed against the FIR. Rohit did not explain how the police had filed a chargesheet without recording the statement of the victim. Nasir had tried to file a complaint with the Delhi Police on at least five different occasions between 12 March and 7 July, including the visit with Sharma. Initially relieved that the police was finally acting on his complaint, Nasir told us that he was stunned when he saw the FIR.
The FIR, a copy of which is with The Caravan, had been filed around 11 pm on 25 February, at the Bhajanpura station. The complainant is a police official, Ashok Kumar, an ASI. The FIR refers to a clash between two groups, who resorted to stone pelting and gunfire. It mentions seven people, including Nasir, who were reportedly injured during the violence, along with their medico legal certificate numbers. Despite a series of questionnaires sent to multiple police officials, the Delhi Police did not provide a straightforward response about why it had neglected to inform Nasir about the FIR for over four months and why no official took his statement during that period despite repeated attempts to lodge a complaint. On 8 July, the Delhi Police wrote to us regarding the FIR, “During investigation, five accused persons have been arrested.” But the police did not tell us how these arrests were made without the victim being questioned till 7 July.
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