Mulund cops violated constitutional rights

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 Mulund cops violated constitutional rights

MUMBAI: The highhandedness of the police in dragging 16 young couples, including minors, from a Mulund park to the police station, calling in their parents and shaming them in the name of counselling and the alacrity with which the youngsters were fined Rs 1,200 for indecency in a public place has triggered a volley of criticism from legal experts and rights activists.

Police should limit themselves to curbing actual crimes and not get into moral policing, said one. Another women's right's activist pointed out that when crimes far more heinous are taking place, the focus of the cops must be on making the streets safer for women.

Considering that the youngsters were minding their own business and there was no specific complaint against them, the police should have applied their mind before booking them under Section 110 of the Bombay Police Act. The cops have been resorting to the archaic section all too often by applying their own individual subjective standards of decency, lawyers said.

TOI has been running a campaign for the past several months to get the government to review and amend such outdated laws.

The police defended their action as steps taken to ensure women's safety. What the police could have done, said young advocate Suhail Singh, is to ask the young women, mostly adults in their late teens or early 20s, if the men they were with were harassing them. Once satisfied that the couples were minding their own business, the police had no business to impose fines and book them for petty offences.

"The police action is a flagrant violation of the citizen's constitutional rights. And the police could not have called their parents when the couples are adults who have a fundamental right to be anywhere or with anyone as long as they were not committing any crime," Singh added.

Some pointed out that the swift action of the cops in fining the 30 youngsters Rs 1,200 each (one couple was let off for being minors) stands in sharp contrast to their reaction to people who harass women on the roads. They usually try not to register FIRs in cases of harassment and are often loathe to apply more stringent laws on so-called "eve-teasers".

Also police tend to fine those who are in a position to pay. "For many young people, going to a police station is a stigma and causes fear. Such people prefer to readily pay a fine and be done with," said former senior cop Y P Singh.

As Veena Gowda, an advocate and a women's activist, said: "If the police and state are serious about creating a safe society for women, they have to create safe spaces for women where they can express themselves without the fear of violent reactions either from society or police."

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