Bareilly:
In a shocking case, a woman police officer was dragged on the road by her subordinates in a vehicle after she objected to extortion by them in the name of traffic checking.
Kalpana Saxena, a senior police officer of Uttar Pradesh is now in hospital, after being dragged on Thursday night for a kilometre and a half in full public view, by her subordinates. Saxena is a 1990-batch officer of the state's Provincial Police Service
She told NDTV that he had caught her colleagues extorting money from truck drivers. "When they recognised me, they tried to run away from the spot, and run me over. But I moved aside, caught the car window and was then dragged along," said Kalapana, who is a Superintendent of Police (Traffic) in Bareilly.
The three traffic constables named in the FIR by Kalpana - Ravindra Singh, Ravindra Kumar and Manoj Kumar - have been charged with 'attempt to murder'. All of them are missing, and the Uttar Pradesh police has, so far, just suspended them.
Such a brazen attack on a woman police officer, especially in a state where the Chief Minister herself is a woman, has the government scrambling to save face. "The scrictest possible action will be taken against the guilty policemen. They will be treated like any other criminal," assured Gurbachan Lal, the Inspector-General of Bareilly Range.
Senior police officers have expressed outrage at the incident, and admit that indiscipline and corruption is a huge problem, that is clearly taking too much time to address.