Chandigarh, December 23: They were top police officers in Punjab and Haryana and both were found guilty. While one was caught molesting a teenaged girl, another slapped the posterior of a senior woman civil servant.
The two cases are separated by several years, but the similarities both cops were in the rank of director general of police (DGP) are lost on none.
People now see former Haryana DGP S.P.S. Rathore’s conviction by a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) special court here Monday for molesting 14-year-old Ruchika Girhotra Aug 12, 1990 as proof that the police forces have been led by men who are no less than criminal.
They cite the case of Punjab “supercop” K.P.S. Gill, who was accused of outraging the modesty of Indian Administrative Service officer Rupan Deol Bajaj in July 1988.
“These senior police officials think they are above the law and they cannot be held accountable for any crime. That is why they indulge in such heinous crimes like rape and murder,” Ranjan Lakhanpal, a prominent lawyer and a human rights activist, told IANS.
Lakhanpal said the entire law and the judicial system needed an overhaul to make it more effective.
For instance, Rathore’s conviction came 19 years after the incident. The victim, Ruchika, a budding tennis player who was also set to move to Canada then, committed suicide December 1993, three years after the incident, following continued harassment faced by her and her family.
This was allegedly at the behest of goons let loose by Rathore and other intimidatory tactics he used through his powerful official position. Her brother was slapped with cases of theft and the family was finally forced to move out of Haryana.
But the case against Rathore was relentlessly pursued by Anand and Madhu Prakash, the parents of Ruchika’s best friend Aradhana.
The other high-profile DGP to be convicted, K.P.S. Gill, was held guilty by various courts for outraging the modesty of Bajaj at a party in Chandigarh in July 1988. When Gill slapped the posterior of Bajaj in a drunken state, he was the Punjab DGP – just fresh from his success of Operation Black Thunder to flush out armed terrorists from the Golden Temple complex, the holiest of Sikh shrines, in Amritsar.
Gill, who continues to enjoy Z-plus security from the government as he was credited with eliminating terrorism in Punjab in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was first convicted by Chandigarh’s chief judicial magistrate (CJM) in August 1996. He was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.
The district and sessions court here in January 1998 upheld the conviction but changed the sentence to three years of probation. The Punjab and Haryana High Court here too upheld the sentence but reduced the probation to one year. The Supreme Court too upheld his conviction.
-Agencies