Local goons are posting blood-soaked letters, pieces of bones, and strands of hair to threaten him, alleges this 79-year-old journalist. He blames a police-builder nexus
Local goons are posting blood-soaked letters, pieces of bones, and strands of hair to threaten him, alleges this 79-year-old journalist. He blames a police-builder nexus
Amrik Singh Layallpuri, editor of an Urdu weekly, has been a witness to the horrors of the Partition. But, what he is going through now is, according to him, scarier.
Apart from the regular articles and letters in the neatly-written Persian script, the veteran journalist is receiving parts of human bones, letters soaked in blood, witchcraft props like human hair and vermillion marked horoscopes since May 31. All this, for standing up against the local builders and the "conniving" police, alleges Singh.
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Singh, a native of the Layallpur district of the undivided Punjab, settled down at a now sleepy mansion with lofty ceilings at the Kashmere Gate in central Delhi. The locality, now a bustling market place known for its numerous auto spares shops, was one of the main centers where people migrated from after the Partition in 1947.
However, the charge was refuted by the then Station House Officer of the Kashmere Gate police station Arun Kumar. "He was into this habit of registering arbitrary complaints against a number of people. The charges are baseless," he told MiD DAY.
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Au00a0mail parcel addressed to him pics/mid-day |
Speaking about the threats that he is receiving over the last month, Singh said: "Initially I started getting threatening calls, but later it became weird as I started getting letters written in blood and material used in cremation."
"After a while they started making hoax calls to the police and the fire brigade in my name. Often a police party would come to my house in the midnight alleging that I deal in country-made guns or there would be fire officials enquiring about a cylinder blast complaint," he added.
But Singh did not relent and waged a battle against the auto spares shops, saying that they cannot be allowed to run in a residential area. "Now, even they have turned against me," he said.
"A local builder Anand Sharma has threatened to kidnap my family, if I do not withdraw my complaint against his illegal constructions," Singh claimed.
Singh claimed he tried to lodge a complaint with the Senior Citizen Cell of the Delhi Police on July 30 but it went unattended. This prompted him to write to the Lieutenant Governor's office.
Scary: (from top to bottom) A bunch of hair, a horoscope marked by vermillion and bones that were sent to Singh's house
(with inputs from Aarushi Chaturvedi)
Gateway to the past
It was the area around the North gate of the walled city of Delhi, leading to the Laal Quila, the Red Fort of Delhi. The gate faced Kashmir thus it was named Kashmere Gate. The monument can still be seen.
The gate first got national attention during the Mutiny of 1857, considered to be the first war of Indian Independence. Indian freedom fighters fired cannon balls from this gate at the British soldiers and used the area to assemble for strategising. Here, the first patriots committed to the cause of independence.
The British had used the gate to prevent the mutineers from entering the city. Evidence of the struggles is visible even today in damages to the existing walls.
Kashmere Gate was the scene of an important assault by the British Army during the Indian rebellion of 1857, during which, on the morning of September 14, 1857, the bridge and the left leaf of the Gate were destroyed, starting the final assault on the rebels.
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