Bengal woman sticks to guns against Delhi cops

New Delhi: Sajanu Parveen, a resident of Malda’s Chanchal who has claimed that Delhi police personnel in plainclothes had picked her up from a Delhi slum and assaulted her, doubled down on her allegations on Wednesday.

Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee had flagged the alleged assault – in which she said even Parveen’s child was not spared –as an example of how Bengali-speakers were being tortured in BJP-ruled states in the name of nabbing illegal immigrants.

Delhi’s deputy commissioner of police (east) Abhishek Dhania had denied the allegations, dismissing them as politically motivated. Mamata had stuck to her guns, saying the truth will eventually come out.

“They [Delhi cops] are not showing the place where I was taken to and assaulted,” Parveen said on Wednesday addressing a news conference at the Trinamool Bhawan in Kolkata, flanked by state minister and city mayor Firhad Hakim and party spokesperson Kunal Ghosh.

“I asked them where they had bought me and my son. I was told it was some hospital, Mangalam,” Parveen said.

“The first day, four people came in plainclothes and claimed they were from the CID. They asked for my Aadhaar card. When I told them we are from Malda, they said you are from West Bengal, everybody in West Bengal is Bangladeshi,” Parveen said.

“I told them if everyone in West Bengal is Bangladeshi, is the chief minister Mamata Banerjee also Bangladeshi?”

Parveen, a mother of three, said she was picked up the next day.

“There is no CCTV footage from where they picked me up, where they took me and the Rs. 25,000 that we were forced to pay them. They made us sign several papers. We don’t know what they were about,” Parveen alleged.

“One of them hit my son so hard, there was a cut above his ear and started bleeding. They said if we said Jai Shree Ram we could go.”