Assam police officer booked for assault on woman in Guwahati

The FIR lodged by a woman who runs a beauty parlour said Goswami had gone to her beauty parlour, misbehaved with her, made indecent proposals, hurled abuses and also physically assaulted her. The incident took place at around 9 PM in the beauty parlour-cum-spa on the busy GS Road. It was outside a bar on the same GS Road that a sensational case of sexual assault on a woman had hit international headlines in July 2012.

“The man had come to my spa earlier in the day and taken our services. But he returned again in the evening, entered my premises and asked me to come with him. He appeared drunk. When I refused and one of my associates informed the police, he hurled abuses and physically assaulted me. He even tried to snatch a cane from a constable to attack me,” the woman told the media.

SSP Tiwari said while the officer in-charge of Dispur himself rushed to the spot, he found Goswami there, took him to the police station where the woman almost immediately lodged an FIR against him. “Since the relevant Sections under which the FIR was lodged referred to crimes that were punishable for less than seven years, so we had to let Goswami go as per the new guidelines of the Supreme Court under the amended Section 41(A) of the CrPC,” SSP Tiwari told The Indian Express today.

“Since the woman had in her FIR complained that Goswami was in an inebriated condition, so we also sent him to the MMC Hospital for a medical examination, after which he was examined by the police for about two hours in the Panbazar DySP’s chamber,” SSP Tiwari said.

While Section 448 of the IPC relates to house-trespass, Section 427 relates to mischief causing damage to the amount of Rs 50, Section 294 to obscene act in public place to the annoyance of others, and Section 354 relates to assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty.

A 1993-batch officer of the Assam Police Service, Goswami, who was till recently Commandant of the 12th Assam Police Battalion before being appointed as Commandant of the Assam Forest Battalion, had won a police medal for meritorious services on Republic Day in 2013. Ironically, he had also attended a two-day workshop on gender sensitization in the National Police Academy, Hyderabad in 2012.