The police officer from UP’s Bulandshahar district who stood up to a group of local BJP supporters and sent five of them to jail for trying to bully her out of doing her job, was transferred to Bahraich on Saturday. Shrestha Thakur had received widespread praise for sticking to her guns when a video of her telling the BJP members off went viral in June.

The clip showed her taking a stand against the group of men who were trying to stop the police from producing a local BJP leader before the court. The accused, Pramod Lodhi, was arrested for assaulting a traffic police official who fined him for not having the right papers for his vehicle. On June 23, days after his arrest, several BJP activists hit the streets shouting anti-police slogans (“police prashasan murdabad”) outside the district court compound and tried to keep Lodhi from being taken to court.

In the video, Thakur can be seen intervening at this point, saying, “Please go and get written orders from the chief minister that the police have no right to check vehicles...that we can’t do our job.” The BJP activists then accused the police of accepting bribes and of falsely arresting Lodhi, to which Thakur responded, “We don’t leave our families at night for fun, it is our duty.” She even told the crowd she would charge them for creating public disorder.

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After the incident was discussed widely, a delegation of BJP legislators in UP is believed to have met CM Yogi Adityanath to complain about her behaviour. Senior officials in UP Police, however, said that Thakur’s case is that of a routine transfer. She was one officer in a batch of around 250 whose names were in Saturday’s transfer list. “Also she will be on field duty and not in a dormant post,” a senior police official who did not wish to identified told Scroll.in. “So it cannot be categorised as a case of punishment.”