Not just drunk driving, stunt biking, too, will land you behind bars this New Year’s Eve. The Delhi Police have decided to view ‘all drivers posing safety hazards to fellow road users’ through the same prism.
With the Capital on high alert, given apprehensions of a possible terror strike, not to mention their past experience with amateur biker gangs on December 31, the Delhi Police will go a step beyond noting down registration numbers of stunt bikers so that they can be fined later.
A senior Delhi Police officer told The Hindu that the force had decided to lock up stunt bikers at local police stations across the Capital — at least through the night on New Year’s Eve — ‘to teach them a lesson well into the beginning of the New Year’.
“Anyone found breaking the law — be it by driving under the influence of alcohol or by performing stunts or even triple riding — will be put in jail on that very night with chances of release bleak until at least the afternoon of January one,” said a senior police officer.
“We are in the process of engineering a deployment plan, which will not be static and be able to enforce the law uniformly across vulnerable routes. Detentions will be made first and questions asked later simply because we cannot afford to take any chances,” the officer added.
A police source said the legal basis for this would be the proclamation of Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (Cr.PC) at the respective sub-divisions where several ‘sensitive locations’ fall.
These included Central Delhi’s Connaught Place, Khan Market and Bengali Market, South Delhi’s Saket, Vasant Vihar and Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road, East Delhi’s Laxmi Nagar, Preet Vihar and Karkadooma, Dwarka, Punjabi Bagh and Vikaspuri in the West in addition to Kamla Nagar, Pitampura and Rohini in the North-West.
The said sub-section empowers the local police to detain participants in assemblies of more than five persons and anyone in contravention of instructions already given by the Divisional Magistrate of a sub-division or a police officer equivalent to that office.
Major challengeStunt bikers have, over the past two years, emerged as a major challenge for the Delhi Police, with both the traffic department and their local counterparts having employed everything from combined, dedicated drives at night to counselling from heads or religious institutions to rein in stunt bikers and discourage them from taking to the streets.
A series of incidents of stunt bikers holding Central Delhi to ransom had pushed the police to the edge last year and culminated in the death of a teenaged pillion rider, Karan Pandey, in what the police had described as an ‘unfortunate death in self defence’ on June 28, 2013.
