It seemed like a frightening replay of earlier situation (November 2011) when IPS officer D.D. Misra, a whistleblower on corruption, was forcibly picked up by the police and taken to a mental asylum.
A similar scene was enacted here on Monday, just before midnight, when an officer of the allied Provincial State Services was forcibly picked up while he was staging dharna and taken to the psychiatric ward of a medical college in the state capital. When the doctors there refused to admit him, he was packed off to his hometown Aligarh late into the night. A police official told this correspondent on Tuesday that the officer was mentally disturbed since he was talking incoherently.
The officer, Rinku Singh Rahi, was sitting on his fast unto death demanding a probe into charges of corruption in state-run schemes.
His dharna did not attract media attention through the day since he chose on stage his protest outside the Vidhan Sabha where a host of labourers were working.
Mr Rahi is posted as the district social welfare officer in Muzaffarnagar and in March 2009, he was shot at by the local mafia.
As a result of the assault, he lost vision in one eye. The attack came after he reported accounting discrepancies worth `40 crores to higher authorities.
He claims that attack was carried out at the behest of those officials whom he was trying to expose. After the formation of the new government, he decided to stage a dharna in Lucknow in order to attract the attention of the chief minister.
On Monday night, around midnight, a posse of cops told him that they were taking him to the hospital because he suffered from low blood pressure. When he resisted, Mr Rahi was physically bundled into a jeep and taken to various hospitals but the doctors refused to admit him into the psychiatric wards. He was later sent to Aligarh by the police.
Though Mr Rahi could not be contacted on Tuesday and his family members were apparently afraid to talk, sources said that the main accused in the murderous assault on the official was one Mukesh Choudhury who happened to be the Samajwadi Party candidate from Charthawal Assembly segment.
Choudhury is allegedly one of the key beneficiaries of the corruption in the social welfare department of the district.