How UP police continues to terrorise the innocent

One of the promises by the Akhilesh Yadav government when it came to power in March 2012 was to punish errant police officers, who have falsely implicated youths as terrorists. Sadly, the opposite seems to have occurred.

Liyaqat Ali Shah is a case in point. Apprehended, interrogated for about two hours and then released by the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) at Danda checkpost of Sonauli border in Maharajganj district of eastern UP on March 20, 2013, Liyaqat was accused of being a “terrorist who had received training in PoK’s Muzaffarabad”. Having found nothing against him, Liyaqat was set free. But he was caught again and brought back when the members of Hindu Yuva Vahini protested against the SSB for releasing him.

The fact of the matter is that intelligence agencies had known of Liqayat’s innocence for some time. The SSB sources admitted they knew from the documents provided to them by Liyaqat that he was a resident of Jammu and Kashmir. He had visited PoK between 1997 and 2000 in disillusionment and fear of life in Kupwara, his home district because his elder brother Manjoor Shah was killed in an encounter. Later, Liyaqat realised that he was on a wrong path and decided to avail amnesty under the rehabilitation policy of the Jammu and Kashmir government.

But while the Akhilesh Yadav government has proved to be reckless in this matter, the Mayawati government was no better. Ajijur Rahman Sardar of Biramnagar, Majherpara in West Bengal was picked up by the Special Task Force (STF) of the UP police on June 28, 2007 and put in Lucknow jail for his alleged association with Jalaluddin Mullah, alias Babu Bhai. Babu Bhai has admitted to being involved in terror strikes through camps in PoK, which touch New Delhi, Mumbai, Varanasi, Bijnore and Unnao in UP.

The UP Police claimed that on June 22, 2007, Ajijur, along with his other accomplices, had reached Lucknow with explosives on June 22, 2007. But this theory turned out to be a bundle of lies as the Bengal CID in a charge sheet submitted in February 2009 with the additional judicial magistrate, Alipore, stated that Ajijur, was arrested in an armed robbery case in Tiljala area of Kolkata district and was in their custody on June 22, 2007. Interestingly, UP police had also claimed that he had confessed that he was in Lucknow on June 22, 2007, with explosives.

These false accusations along with uncorroborated or sometimes false evidence by the intelligence agencies, is something no state government has cracked down upon. The biggest faux pas is that of Aftab Alam Ansari.

An electrician with a power company in Kolkata, Ansari was arrested by the UP STF in December 2007 and dubbed as “Indian chief of Harkatul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI)”. The police had tagged many aliases to his name, including "Raju Bangladeshi". They also claimed that he was from Bangladesh and had entered India several times to execute bomb blasts in eastern UP. They had charged him for Varanasi’s Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple blast of November 2007.

Fortunately for Ansari, his mother was able to produce documents in court which proved that he was on duty in his office in Kolkata on those dates on which the UP STF had shown him in UP. But others may be not be so lucky. It is high time that such errant cops are pulled up by the state government so that the real terrorists do not get away scot-free.