PALAKKAD: Finally, Bharati can heave a sigh of relief. For the past four years, the 84-year-old from Kunissery in Palakkad has been waging a legal battle to prove her innocence after she was wrongly implicated in a case following ‘mistaken identity’.
On Tuesday, a Palakkad court let her off after the complainant told it that he doesn’t wish to pursue the case, registered in 1998, further as the person presented by the police was not the ‘real culprit’.
The Palakkad south police, without proper verification of details, arrested Bharati in 2019, mistaking her for another Bharati against whom a case was registered in 1998 for creating a ruckus, breaking and destroying some properties in a house, where she had been working as a maid. The real accused, however, absconded after securing bail in the case.
At the police station, the accused had given the address of Bharati, against whom the former reportedly had been nursing a grudge. The case had been dormant for many years, and in 2019, the police out of the blue reached Bharati’s house at Kunissery to take the ‘absconding accused’ into custody.
Though a shocked Bharati, a widow who has no children, tried to convince the police that they were mistaken, the cops did not listen to her. Bharati told the police that her husband, Gangadharan, was with the PWD in Tamil Nadu and had died while in service. The police also ignored the fact that she was well-off and didn’t need to work as a maid to make a living.
“It was on an ‘Ayilyam’ day after Onam that the police came to my house to arrest me. I told them that I have not worked as a maid anywhere. The police waited from morning till evening at my house. They said if I didn’t go with them, they would bring women officers and arrest me. The police left only after my relatives promised that they would present me at the station the next day,” Bharati told TNIE. The next day the relatives took Bharati to court after consulting a lawyer. Subsequently, she was granted bail.
“My aunt could have been spared the ordeal if cops had bothered to cross-check with the complainant,” said P V Anup Kumar, a relative.
Name mix-up: Court lets ‘Bharati’ free
“Except during the Covid period, my mother’s sister (Bharati) used to attend the court hearings herself. The complainant, Rajagopal of Kallikad, never used to attend the hearings as he was not getting any summons. Later, we went to his house and apprised him of the developments. He agreed to come to the court today (Tuesday),” Anup said.
When the case came up for hearing at the Chief Judicial Magistrate Court III in Palakkad on Tuesday, Rajagopal submitted that the maid who worked at his house was much younger and that the ‘Bharati’ present at the court was not the culprit. Following this, the court set her free.
Bharati said she has been living in Kunissery for the last 48 years since her husband’s death. “Earlier, I was living in my ancestral house. But later I built a house on the land purchased by my husband before his death. I don’t go anywhere. My daily routine is to go to temples, read Ramayana and attend satsangs. I live alone with my pension and all my relatives stay nearby and help me, she said.
DySP Shahul Hameed of Palakkad south station said the case was registered in 1998 and a warrant was issued later against the accused who had jumped bail. Later in 2019, when a special drive was launched, a new officer checked the address and asked Bharati to appear in court, following which she secured bail.