A retired solider shot dead the abductor and rapist of his minor daughter near the Gorakhpur civil court on Friday.
Dilshad Hussain (25) had abducted the minor daughter of retired BSF jawan Bhagwat Nishad on February 12, 2020, after which the distraught father lodged a case of kidnapping, rape and POCSO Act against him. On March 12, 2021 police arrested Hussain in Hyderabad and rescued the minor girl.
Shockingly, the rape-accused Hussain was released two months ago on bail. He was a resident of Muzaffarpur, Bihar and used to run a puncture repair shop in front of Bhagwat Nishad’s house in Gorakhpur’s Badhalganj area.
On Friday, Hussain had come to the court in connection with the case. At around 1.15pm, he called his advocate Shankar Sharan Shukla at the civil court gate. However, before the advocate could reach there, Bhagwat Nishad shot the rapist in the head. Nishad was arrested soon after by police.
Such cases of vigilante justice are worrying, but they also cast a spotlight on our broken judicial system where those accused of preying on one of the most vulnerable sections of society – minor girl children – are let off on bail so easily.
Issues which capture the imagination of the liberal elites are fast-tracked and indulged with extraordinary police and legal action. For eg., police undertook inter-state raids to arrest those allegedly linked to the Bulli Bai app, within days of a complaint being lodged. The accused have been denied bail.
But in this case, which seems to be a classic example of grooming jihad and sexual abuse, it took over an year for the police to trace a minor girl abducted from UP and taken to Telangana. And even after the accused was arrested, the judiciary let him off on bail after just 6 months?
We can only imagine the pain that the Nishad family must have undergone in that entire one year their daughter was missing – how helpless the father must have felt, that on the one hand he spent the best part of his youth guarding our borders but when it came to protect his own family, the secular Indian state was least bothered. And when the daughter was finally recovered and the perpetrator arrested – he would have felt some relief. But imagine the rage and helplessness that must have coursed through that ex-serviceman when the accused was released on bail? Were some palms greased, or was it the inherent bleeding-heart liberalism of our state?
The ordinary Indian is fast losing faith in the secular Republic of India and its dysfunctional institutions – this truth cannot be hidden behind cliched statements like “judiciary is the last hope of common man” anymore. The time for corrective action is now.
