The disappearance and rescue – after three months – of popular DJ Damini Bhajanka has left many questions about the role of the Assam police.
On the night of December 13, a day before she was supposed to fly down to Mumbai to get married to a Kashmiri Muslim man, Damini Bhajanka went missing from Guwahati.
A popular disc jockey who lives and works in Mumbai, her social media feed went silent, her phones were switched off.
For three months, her partner Waseem Raja Mughal searched for the 27-year-old woman. He filed a police complaint about her disappearance in Guwahati. He wrote to the National Commission of Women and filed a habeas corpus petition at the Gauhati High Court. “I went to everybody, from the police to the media for three months,” he told Scroll. “But nobody listened to me. They accused me of lying or of being mad.”
Bhajanka was finally rescued from a resort in Shillong on March 12, when she gave a written statement to the Meghalaya police, accusing her family members of kidnapping her and confining her against her wishes in a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts and alcoholics. “They did all these to stop my marriage with a Muslim man,” Bhajanka told Scroll.
The alleged abduction of an adult woman by her family, and confinement for three months to stop an inter-faith marriage – without the police taking any action – has raised eyebrows in Assam and elsewhere.
On March 15, Bhajanka filed a complaint at Mumbai’s Versova police station, asking for a zero FIR to be filed against her mother, brother, maternal uncle, cousin and his girlfriend.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.