'A woman constable in Gujarat has been transferred to the police headquarters after she reportedly had an altercation with the son of a Bharatiya Janata Party legislator for violating lockdown rules in Surat, The Indian Express reported on Sunday. An inquiry was set up after the purported audio and video clips of the incident was widely circulated on social media. Prakash Kanani, son of Varachha Road MLA and Minister of State for Health Kumar Kanani, had an argument with constable Sunita Yadav, who pointed out that he and his friends were out during curfew hours.
'With the water level of several rivers rising in Uttar Pradesh due to continuous rainfall last week, state water resources minister Mahendra Singh has instructed the irrigation department to hold regular pujas (prayers) by those rivers in order to “control” possible flooding in the areas around them. The minister gave these instructions on July 12, while addressing field staff of the department through a video conference, organised to review the precautionary measures taken to check flooding. The press note issued after the meeting mentioned the minister’s specific order...'
'A 22-year-old woman who filed a police complaint alleging gangrape in Bihar’s Araria district has been arrested on charges of disrupting court proceedings on July 10. She had demanded the presence of social workers during the recording of her statement before the district judge, said members of the Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan, a non-profit organisation that helped her through the process of filing a first information report with the Araria police. Two social workers who had accompanied her to the court – Kalyani Badola and Tanmay Nivedita – have also been arrested.
'In yet another case of police high-handedness, a family in Mawana town of Meerut district in Uttar Pradesh has alleged that cops from the local police station ransacked their house on mere suspicion that one of their family members was involved in illegal animal slaughter. The incident of alleged police vandalism took place in Rajo Wala Bagh area of Mawana on Saturday night. According to the family, nearly a dozen policemen barged into the house asking for Mohd Umar. When the family told cops that the man was not in the house, the policemen started breaking household items...'
'IN THE arms of a young girl, three years old, is another child that isn’t yet one. She struggles with his weight, slight as he is, trying to feed him out of a bottle. It is a burden that is heavy to bear. But the fight against hunger for children of the Musahari tola in Badbilla village of Bhagalpur has been a daily challenge. In this lockdown, that burden has only become heavier. A microcosm of Bihar, Bhagalpur is the focus of a month-long series by The Indian Express to understand the pandemic’s effects in smalltown India.
'On the same day that eight policemen were gunned down in Uttar Pradesh, two equally horrific incidents went unnoticed. First, four members of a family were murdered in Allahabad. Then, a 19-year-old Dalit girl and her father were murdered by her stalker, who belongs to the Thakur caste, days before her wedding. These are not isolated incidents, but part of a larger crime arc that would have been labelled ‘gunda raj’ if they had occurred under the governance of a lower-caste Chief Minister.
'What started off as a normal work day for 31-year-old Bennix, the owner of a mobile phone shop in Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi district, turned out to be the starting point of a fatal ordeal. On Friday, June 19, around 8 pm, Bennix was in his shop near the Kamarajar statue in Sathankulam town when his friend rushed to him with the news that his father Jayaraj had been picked up by the police. Worried about his 58-year-old father, Bennix rushed to the Sathankulam police station only to be called in by the police officers there for an ‘inquiry’.
'Fifty-seven minor girls have tested positive for the novel coronavirus at a state-run children’s shelter home in Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, with five of them found to be pregnant and one HIV positive. Since the information was confirmed, the UP administration has gone into a frenzy, even as officials said the pregnancies began before the lockdown. The shelter home has been sealed, and its staff quarantined.
'On June 16, BMC admitted that it had not reported 862 Covid-19 deaths in Mumbai, and added the figure to the official toll. This took the city’s fatality rate from 3.7 to 5.2 per cent — almost double the national average. The Indian Express has now accessed medical records of a few more deceased Covid-19 patients or those suspected to have been infected, which are yet to be reported by BMC officially as Covid-19 deaths, an indication that there could be many more like them.
'The Delhi Police’s First Information Report into one the most controversial deaths in the 2020 Delhi Riots omits any reference to the police’s alleged role in the incident. 23-year-old Faizan died in February this year, days after he was violently assaulted by uniformed policemen and forced to sing the national anthem. A video of the incident sparked outrage after it went viral online and was also carried by several news outlets.
