By Sharanya Gopinathan
Have you seen this amazing video of an Uttar Pradesh policewoman named Shrestha Thakur standing down a group of BJP hooligans? It’ll absolutely make your day.
The exchange took place on Friday outside the district court compound in Bulandshahr. Thakur was deployed to deal with a group of angry men trying to prevent Pramod Lodhi, the husband of a Zila Panchayat member, from being produced in court over a traffic violation and the assault of a public servant.
In the video, you can see BJP workers try to raise slogans against Thakur, who simply smiles and waits for them to get on with it. When they see that it’s absolutely not intimidating her in the least, they switch tactics and try to talk to her, with truly fantastic results. Since they were basically raising a ruckus over what started as a traffic violation, she tells them to go get a letter from the Chief Minister saying that police have no authority to check vehicles, and then informs them that police deployed in the area are on duty, and that nobody enjoys leaving their families to patrol the city, but that it’s their job and they have the authority to do it.
She goes on to smash their last vestige of security in their status as BJP party workers when she says that by creating a ruckus as they were, they were only bringing a bad name to the BJP, and that people would call them BJP gundas rather than party workers.
At one point, she informs the main person shouting that of all the thousands of people they check, only he has a problem with the way police carried out their duties. At this point, another member of the group pipes up that he has a problem with it too, so Thakur pulls him to the front, leading to my favourite part of the exchange. She says that it’s people like him who start Hindu-Muslim riots, and then when he says a “who-me?” type thing, she mysteriously asks what his son was doing in the past week. He had nothing to say, and even if he did, it didn’t look like Thakur was interested in listening, because she was too busy turning to the rest of the crowd and watching them slink away in shame and defeat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5Vh7U9402c