For Rajini Singh, 2019 has been a year of “upheaval” and “betrayal”. On December 3, 2018, her husband, Station House Officer Subodh Singh, was assaulted and then shot dead by a mob in Syana area of Bulandshahr after a protest by right-wing groups at Chirangwathi police post over alleged bovine carcasses found strewn in a field in the Mahav village nearby turned violent.
In the past year, Yogesh Raj, convener of the local Bajrang Dal unit, and Shikhar Agarwal, former president of the BJP’s youth wing in Syana, the alleged conspirators for instigating violence, along with several others, have been granted bail by the Allahabad High Court, and the U.P. government has yet to file an appeal against the order.
SLP filed in SC
Indicating that there were lacunae in the charge sheet, Ms. Singh has filed a Special Leave Petition through senior advocate Sanjay Hegde in the Supreme Court for cancellation of the bail of Mr. Raj, the main accused. The case is scheduled to come up for hearing on December 6, she told The Hindu .
Describing it as “planned lynching of an officer on duty”, Ms. Singh said, “I waited for a year, for it was for society and his department that he laid down his life. I thought society and the system will get him justice but he was let down.”
Senior U.P. Police officers, Ms. Singh claimed, had told her that they could not push the case further and she had to take it forward herself.
She said that a day before the mob attacked the police station, he had requested his seniors for reinforcements. “I had called him a day before the incident but he put my call on hold to speak to his seniors asking for more personnel as he could gauge the impending threat,” she said.
Akhlaq case
Ms. Singh suspected that there was a link between his killing and him being the first investigating officer in the Akhlaq lynching case of 2015 when he was posted in Dadri. “I have been told that close relatives of those who were charge-sheeted in the Akhlaq lynching case live in Syana,” she said.
The thing that hurt her the most was the response of society. “A police officer is neither a Hindu nor a Muslim. He is expected to uphold the rule of law. The way a communal narrative is being built around the case and the accused who got bail were welcomed show that my husband was wrong in believing that he was defending his own people,” she said.
The rot
Ms. Singh said that the fact that a temple has been built in the memory of the boy (Sumit Dalal) who was throwing stones moments before he was killed by a stray bullet signifies how deep the rot is.
Raghvendra Kumar Mishra, Circle Officer (City), Bulandshahr, who investigated the case, said five of the accused, including Prashant Natt who allegedly killed Subodh Singh with his service revolver, are lodged in jail. “Yogesh Raj was slapped with Section 124-A (sedition) along with charges for inciting violence. We would support cancellation of his bail in the Supreme Court,” he said.
