Tragedy under the heel of a cybercrime crackdown

Police chase cyber fraudster, leading to tragic death of infant in Alwar village, sparking protests and national attention.

Just before daybreak on March 2, two police SUVs darted around the hamlet of Teliyabas in Raghunathgarh village of Alwar district in Rajasthan. The police from Naugaon, about 5 kilometres away, were chasing a dot on a map. The dot, moving rapidly, represented the location of a suspected cyber fraudster. A cyber cell embedded in the district headquarters of Alwar police had sent local police a tip off on the location of a smartphone involved in a scam.

The police’s pursuit of the dot brought them to the door of Razida and Imran Khan, 26 and 27 years old. Not yet fully awake, Razida opened the door to their single room home, one in a larger structure of five rooms, where the extended family lives. A policeman allegedly barged in and dragged the couple out, climbing on top of both the cots in the room to roughly look through the couple’s storage unit above the bed.

No female officer was present. The officer found no phone and began questioning Imran, who people in the neighbourhood say is a labourer. The police took Imran out to their cars, asked whether he had a particular smartphone on him. When he said he didn’t, they let him go.

When the couple came back, they found Alisba — their one-month-old daughter — lying motionless in her blanket, on the cot the policeman had climbed on to. They realised she was dead. “We realised that the policeman had stepped on her when he climbed on to the cot,” says Imran.

Teliyabas, which is a part of the Mewat region where the three States of Rajasthan, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh meet, is among a belt of villages that is hotspot for cyber criminals, or as the locals call them — cyber thuggees . Over 26,000 cybercrime cases have been filed in just Alwar district, many of them against men in their twenties. The village, with a population of a little over 3,000 as per the 2011 census, is ringed by the Aravali hills and surrounded by rolling fields of wheat and mustard.

On March 16 morning, Nasru Khan, 77, a former Minister with the Congress party and currently a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member, drives from Alwar to Teliyabas, 35 km away, picking up Tahir, an influential maulana in Raghunathgarh village, along the way. Like Alisba’s parents, Nasru and Tahir are from the Meo community, traditionally cattle-raisers. As soon as word of the incident reached him, the former Minister said he raced to the Superintendent of Police’s office, where Razida and Imran had arrived, holding Alisba’s body. Other villagers came in support making sure that a first information report (FIR) was filed citing the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita section 103(1) for murder.

“Every single day the police has been doing raids,” Nasru says in his car, on the way to the village again. “They operate like thugs.”