HAL cops in soup over ‘mediator’ role

Y. Maheswara Reddy | NT

The HAL Police Station has, of late, been hitting the headlines for all wrong reasons. The police are meant to maintain law and order and certainly not to interfere in civil or real estate matters. But the HAL police station officials, right from a police constable to Assistant Commissioner, try to ‘settle’ the issue, whenever someone comes with a complaint related to a rape or a real estate dispute.

It is alleged that higher police officials encourage police constables to play a middle-man or a mediator role between the complainant and the alleged accused. Be it a rape case or a property dispute, the police officers and constables try their best to convince the victims to withdraw their complaints.

If they don’t comply, then the police threaten to summon the victims to the police station and make them wait at the police station the whole day. For example, a police inspector of HAL Police Station was excluded from the investigation of a suspected serial rapist’s attempt to sexually assault a woman in March 2017. The reason was that HAL Police Inspector allegedly persuaded the alleged rape victim not to file a complaint about the sexual assault.

In another incident, the then Chief Minister Siddaramaiah took a police inspector, attached to HAL Police Station, to task for allegedly accepting a bribe from a criminal in 2014.

Now it is the turn of Karnataka Police Complaints Authority to express concern over the complaints against Assistant Commissioner of Police Kishore Bharani of Marathahalli Sub Division and police constable P Ramesh for their alleged involvement in real estate matters.

“We have received a complaint against ACP Kishore Bharani and police constable P Ramesh for allegedly compelling a complainant to withdraw the complaint. The complainant requested us to direct the ACP and the police constable not to interfere in this matter as it is related to civil issue and it is pending in the court,” said Karnataka State Police Complaints Authority Under Secretary V Vijayalakshmi in a letter to the Police Commissioner.

The letter, dated March 23, 2022, also stated that the Karnataka Police Complaints Authority received several complaints against the police officials for interfering in civil matters including property-related issues.

The latest complaint is against ACP Kishore Bharani and a police constable Ravikumar alias Ravi who works as a writer at HAL Police Station. “The ACP and the police inspector have misused their power and manhandled Karnataka Rashtra Samithi volunteers for questioning the ACP and the police. The police registered a false complaint against our volunteers,” said Karnataka Rashtra Samithi president Ravi Krishna Reddy.

Coming down heavily on the police highhandedness, V R Marathe, State Secretary, Lanchamukta Karnataka Nirmana Vedike, has said that police have no authority to summon people to the police station without registering a FIR.