Kolkata: Seven arrested for allegedly harassing former Miss India Universe Ushoshi Sengupta
She alleged that two police stations refused to take her complaints initially as the incident happened in a different jurisdiction.
The Kolkata Police on Tuesday arrested seven people for allegedly stalking and harassing former Miss India Universe Ushoshi Sengupta the previous night.
The model-turned-actor was returning from work with a colleague around 11.40 pm on Monday when a few men on motorcycles stopped her cab at the busy Exide crossing in the city and tried to drag the driver out. They began to abuse the driver even though it was their two-wheeler that had hit the car, she alleged.
“In a fraction of second, there were 15 boys and they all started banging the car window and dragging the driver out,” Sengupta said in a post on Facebook. “They dragged the driver and started beating him up. This is when I stepped out and started shouting taking a video of the incident.”
She wrote that she soon ran to the Maidan police station across the street and requested help. But a police officer told her that the part of the road where the incident occurred was under the jurisdiction of the Bhawanipore station. “This is when I broke down, I begged them [police] to come or else the boys would have killed the driver,” Sengupta wrote. When the police finally reached the spot to berate the men, the abusers pushed the officers and fled, she said.
Sengupta wrote that after the cab started again to drop them off, six men followed the vehicle till Lake Gardens in South Kolkata, where her colleague lives. They threw stones at the car, dragged her out and “tried to break my phone to delete the video”, she said. “My colleague jumped out out of fear and I was completely shaken,” she said.
She said that she then went to the Charu Market Police Station but they also refused to file a complaint and advised her to instead approach the Bhawanipore Police Station. When a complaint was finally registered, she said, they then refused to file the complaint of the driver. “My Uber driver insisted that he wants to do the complaint but the officers didn’t take it,” the post read. “I am attaching the video of the mob and the picture of the broken car.”
“Firstly, if you are getting mobbed, violated, molested or even killed, please be assured about the jurisdiction of the police station before running to them,” Sengupta said. “Secondly, how [do] 15 boys without helmet have such ease to beat up the Uber driver and break the car. What I realised [was] that this was a way to extract money from the driver by threatening him in a mob. This is absolutely a way of extortion.”
Sengupta said the incident had shaken her up. “This is not the Kolkata I came back to, not the Kolkata I left flourishing career outside to come back and live,” she wrote.
“We have taken this incident very seriously and seven persons have been arrested so far,” the Kolkata Police said in a tweet on Tuesday night. “On the order of the Commissioner of Police, Kolkata, an inquiry regarding the non-registration of FIR has been initiated into this incident, at a very senior level.” The arrests were made on the basis of videos that Sengupta provided as well as CCTV footage, PTI reported.