Counterview Desk
Even as welcoming the bail granted by the Punjab and Haryana High Court to young Dalit labour rights leader Nodeep Kaur, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), taking note of continued incarceration of her colleague Shiv Kumar, also a Dalit, has demanded charges against them should be immediately dropped. Arrested in January from a Kundli border point, where they were said to be bring workers’ support to the ongoing farmers’ agitation, Ravi Kiran Jain, president, and Dr V Suresh, general secretary, PUCL, said, both were “brutally tortured.”
While the Haryana police, which picked them up, has been accused mercilessly beating and torturing both, as for Kumar, PUCL quotes a medical report submitted to the High Court on February 23, prepared by a five-doctor panel, which says that “all the injuries on the person of the patient are more than two weeks old and were caused by a blunt object/weapon.” The report also speaks of “four fractures”