A former soldier of the Indian Army, Resham Singh, said that he was tortured by the Uttar Pradesh police, on 3 May, after the police stopped his car at a barricade in Puranpur town of Pilibhit district. The cops abused him on his Sikh identity, tied him up, tore out his turban, pulled his hair, beat him with lathis—causing grave injuries on his backside and hips—and anally penetrated him with a baton, Resham said. The police also manhandled his sisters, according to the first-information report lodged at the Puranpur Sadar police station. Despite the accusations of grave torture and brutality, the FIR accuses the cops of minor bailable offences.
The forty-year-old Resham was travelling with his mother and two sisters to Lakhimpur Kheri to attend his brother-in-law’s funeral rites when they were stopped at the barricade near Sadar police station. The sub-inspector Ram Naresh Singh asked to see their vehicle documents. While Resham was looking for them, the FIR states, Ram Naresh began abusing him for taking too long. When the army veteran asked him to be mindful of his language since his mother and sisters were present, the sub-inspector and other police present at the site started beating him. Resham’s sisters tried to intervene, but the sub-inspector pushed and slapped them too, according to the FIR.
At the time, there were several men gathered at a vote counting centre for the UP panchayat elections set up near the barricade. Many of them came running to see the commotion. Satinder Singh and Harjinder Singh were among these men and they began to take videos of the incident. “We were surprised that they behaved like that with the fauji,” Satinder told me. The police began objecting to their recording of the incident. “The police argued that we wrongly took the videos, and I countered that we have a right to record the incident,” he said. The cops snatched the mobile phones of the two men and tried to delete the videos. “They were able to delete two videos but one was preserved as the phone suddenly got locked while they were fiddling with it,” Satinder said. The video shows ten policemen surrounding Resham Singh, herding him away across the barricade towards the police vehicle. One policeman hits Resham with a Lathi while others push him.
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