An alleged “fake” encounter of a dalit youth in Bihar by the Special Task Force on suspicion of his being an active Maoist sympathiser has led the Opposition parties to seek a CBI probe and adequate compensations to the slain 20-year-old’s poor family.
Pancham Paswan, who reportedly came from Chennai to visit his family in Navadiha village in Gaya district a month ago, was allegedly shot dead by policemen outside his thatched hut on December 23 evening. The Opposition RJD and the Congress have insisted that the youth was innocent and that his murder illustrated the persecution of Bihar’s disadvantaged social sections by the JD(U)-BJP government.
Talking about his only son’s unfortunate death, Ramdev Paswan, 70, told this newspaper: “He had been working at Lakshmi Hardware Shop in Chennai for four years and came home on November 23. He was brutally shot dead by a group of policemen who accused him of having given food to the Maoists.”
When Pancham and his wife Julie Devi slept along with their two-month-old daughter after dinner, some armed policemen jumped into their hut by breaking open its thatched roof and asked them to reveal the whereabouts of the Maoists. “They insisted we had given a dinner with fish dish to some Maoists. When we denied, they dragged my husband outside and one of them shot him dead,” said Julie, weeping, her baby daughter sleeping in her arms.
Senior RJD leader Abdul Bari Siddiqui, who introduced journalists to the grieving family, said: “This case is clearly another example of the state government’s persecution of the deprived sections of society. This fake encounter must be probed by the CBI and his family must be compensated and early for losing its innocent son to the police bullets.”
Julie Devi wrote to the Bihar Human Rights Commission on Wednesday for a probe into the alleged murder. The Congress said it would submit petitions to Bihar governor Devanand Konwar and CM Nitish Kumar to order a CBI probe.