Only silence in Dhalla incident now as ‘beaten’ child thieves disappear, witnesses clam up
March 10, 2008
TORONTO STAR
SONYA FATAH
POHIR, India–When high-profile Brampton MP Ruby Dhalla came to town two months ago, she set off a tizzy with the Indian media that sparked headlines back in Canada and set tongues wagging here.
Now, the people of this dusty Punjabi village appear to have lost their tongues over the tangled tale that started with a routine purse-snatching and culminated with alleged police brutality against the two waifs who were caught red-handed.
The purse was quickly found, but it may take a little longer for the Liberal MP, twice elected in Brampton-Springdale, to fully recover her reputation in the Indian media after being pilloried for her supposed indifference to police handling of the street children.
The local drama that played out in the capital, New Delhi, highlights the intersection of rural India’s endemic poverty with the casual violence inflicted on crime suspects – and the readiness of the country’s highly competitive media to caricature public figures.
The episode turned a routine courtesy call by Dhalla and a delegation of Canadian politicians into a public relations disaster.
Indian media accused the Canadian politician of being a “shockingly callous” ringside observer to the fate of two child thieves as they were beaten “black and blue.”
Unaware of the allegations of police brutality, Dhalla was ambushed by Mumbai-based Times Now, which quoted her as hoping the children had learned a lesson for stealing her assistant’s purse.
In the aftermath, Dhalla scrambled to undo the damage by calling for an investigation into police conduct. She received a full retraction by the offending media in India, who admitted to quoting her unfairly.
Embarrassed local officials promised a full probe.
Today, there is virtually no trace of the tempest that placed Pohir and the Canadian MP in the eye of a media storm. The police investigation has been forgotten. The accused children have disappeared, along with their parents.
Local residents, too, have clammed up. Even the journalist who first accused the police of beating up the children later refused to co-operate, for fear of jeopardizing his visa application to Britain.
A senior police officer investigating the case was transferred. And the formal inquiry probing police conduct has been disbanded, the file thrown into the dusty, paper-filled chambers of Punjab police’s records room.
In their final official report on the case, police insisted the children hadn’t been beaten “black and blue.” Indeed, they hadn’t been beaten at all, police insisted.
“They were medically examined at the Civil Hospital and it was shown that they were not harmed,” said Gurpreet Singh Bhuller, senior police superintendent for Ludhiana district.
“All the villagers said nothing had been done,” Bhullar said, confirming there was no cause for action against any police officers.
“I was in touch with the Punjab police officers on a daily basis and was told of the results of the medical report via phone,” said Dhalla in a telephone interview from Ottawa.
She said she had asked the chief commissioner of Punjab police to launch an inquiry into the incident.
“I didn’t actually have any idea (about the result).”
Pohir is a one-road town flanked by fields on either side, about 20 kilometres south of Ludhiana, Punjab’s largest city.
Everyone here seems to have taken a vow of silence.
Yet, one man had a first-hand account of the episode and swore that the children were beaten, not by local police, but by Amritsar officers accompanying Dhalla’s delegation.
“I was at the event when the whole thing happened,” said Jassi Phallewalia, the journalist who broke the story.
When Phallewalia heard Seema Bhayana, an executive assistant to Dhalla, cry out about her stolen purse, he also heard people pointing out that the two children who had smiled and waved at Dhalla from their front-row seats at the event, had fled. He scurried after them to rescue the purse and return it to its rightful owner.
“An elderly woman spotted the children rushing across the fields. I got onto my motorbike and sped away to catch them.”
The children had thrown the purse into a polyethylene bag as they rode a scooter across the field.
But with Phallewalia in pursuit on a motorcycle, they hardly stood a chance.
“I caught the kids and grabbed the bag. Then the police arrived and snatched the kids. I pulled out my camera and started taking pictures.”
In Phallewalia’s photographs, an 11-year-old boy named Sachin is shown being dragged along the ground, surrounded by police officers.
In another shot, he appears half-conscious, his face wet as he lies in the back seat of a car with his 9-year-old sister, Bindia, her hands clasped together pleadingly.
With his evidence and his eyewitness account, Phallewalia could well have been the key person in an investigation on police brutality. But he said the police never approached him, nor did he go forward with a statement, even though he initially broke the story.
“I didn’t want any negative publicity to adversely affect my visa application,” he said, fearing his testimony might jeopardize his visitor visa application to Britain.
Although Dhalla said she did not want to take action against the children, she didn’t hear about the police report filed by Hardev Singh Liddar, a Brampton resident who hosted an event for the MP at his family’s home in Pohir, until two days after the incident.
In her speech to those gathered in Pohir immediately after the incident, Dhalla said, she appealed to residents to forgive the children.
Meanwhile, Sachin and Bindia, children of migrant workers from the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, were arrested for theft, and taken to observation homes in Ludhiana and Jallander.
For many of the children getting out isn’t as easy as it was for Sachin, whose high-profile arrest earned him bail on Jan. 16.
There has been no trace of Sachin, his sister or his parents since he was granted bail on Jan. 19.
What exactly happened on Jan. 9 will likely never come to light.
The controversy, doubtless exaggerated by Dhalla’s visit to this small, rural village, is over, and the inquiry report, to have been released in mid-February, now long forgotten.
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