Fifteen people who were arrested from the farmhouse of a Bharatiya Janata Party leader in Meghalaya have petitioned the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) for arbitrary arrest and ill-treatment by the police.
The complainants also demanded action against investigating officer Mamata Hajong and West Garo Hills district’s Superintendent of Police, Vivekananda Singh Rathore.
A police team led by Mr. Rathore had on July 22 raided the farmhouse of Meghalaya BJP vice-president and former extremist Bernard N. Marak and arrested 73 people from its premises. Five of them are in judicial custody while the others got bail.
The police said the farmhouse, on the outskirts of Tura town, was being run as a brothel. They also rescued five minors from the place and said liquor used to be sold there without any permit.
In their complaint to the NHRC this week, the 15 said the police had asked everyone to stay where the were when the raid was being conducted. Some of them were loitering on the premises and some were sitting outside with friends while a few others went there to eat momos, a specialty of one of the shops within the premises, they said.
One of the 15 said he managed to get bail on August 7 but his differently-abled fiancée was still in jail for shifting to the farmhouse for a night because of space issues at a rented accommodation after some relatives arrived. The police, he said, refused to believe them and booked them under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act.
Most of the other complainants said they were outside the premises of the farmhouse when the police herded them. A woman among them said she and six others were often slapped by the investigating officer as well as the jail warden.
The BJP in Meghalaya has been divided over the raid at the farmhouse and the arrest of Mr Marak from Hapur in Uttar Pradesh five days later. While a section, including State party chief Ernest Mawrie insinuated Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma of resorting to the “politics of vendetta”, another section said the law should take its own course.
Mr. Sangma, the chief of the National People’s Party (NPP), and Mr. Marak share the same political space. The latter had been attacking the former and his party for months over the alleged misappropriation of funds in the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council. The NPP heads a coalition government of which the BJP is a minor partner.
