Cops grab poor man’s land

He has knocked every door seeking agreed rent. Nobody paid attention. Instead he was ill-treated and threatened by the police, he says. Siddheshwer narrated his agonies to The Indian Express here on Tuesday. He said he approached Commissioner of Police Ahmed Javed and additional commissioner Vinay Kargaokar several times. The police are neither paying the pending rent nor vacating the land which, he said, he needed to start his own business.

He said the police were using the land threatening me not to raise the matter in open and the Solapur Municipal Corporation had issue notices to him to pay the tax or face water cutoff.

He alleged that the police department his father five years ago. “When the boundary wall adjoining the chowki collapsed, the police pressurised my father into reconstructing it and to get rent in one instalment,” he said. His father constructed the wall by borrowing Rs 10,000 from his uncle. But then, the police didn’t give a single paisa, he said.

Interestingly, the police chowki has no power connection of its own.It pays Rs 200 per month to the owner of an electric meter from where the police have got a connection.Siddheshwar has written letters to district collector Apurva Chandra, Chief Minister Manohar Joshi, Union Home Minister L.K. Adwani, Deputy Chief Minister Gopinath Munde and Governor P C Alexander.

The police department sent replies in May and August 1998 making it clear that his application will be considered “as soon as they get alternative building from the SMC. Reacting to the assurance, Siddheshwar said his father has got assurances upon assurances for two decades. They were never implemented by the police department so far, he remarked.

Siddheshwar said law and police are meant to protect the rights of common men and the poor. “When the police themselves are behaving like goondas and encroaching upon the land of the people, what can an ordinary citizen do?”

Assistant police commissioner S A Nipankar, in a letter written to his father on July 24, 1998, has said that the rent had not accepted by him from time to time and that the police had requested the executive engineer, public works to raise the old rent.

Siddheshwar has threatened an indefinite hunger strike if his problem was not solved immediately.