The 70-year-old was dragged out of her house in Amroha by police.
Shocking images of a frail old woman in a white and green salwar kameez dragged out by her arms and legs by two women personnel is doing the rounds of social media in Uttar Pradesh. The woman is 70-year-old Saira Bano, who was being evicted by the police from a tiny ground-floor house in Amroha that had been her home for 15 years.
The video shows the cops stalk inside the house, and amid the crying of children, drag out the woman. Half a dozen policemen watch, shout "
Utaho, Utaho (lift her)" as Saira Bano is dragged across the ground. No one protests. Neighbours film the event on their cellphone. The screaming woman is dragged all the way out of the house and onto the street and is bundled into the back of an auto-rickshaw flagged down by the police.
The landlord, Sudhir Singhal, had appealed to the court asking that the woman's son, Shaukeen Ali, be asked to move. He called in the police to physically evict the family after the court ruled in his favour.
Mr Singhal, a businessman, claims the tenant was refusing to vacate the house.
Claiming that the "intention (of the police) was right but the execution perhaps wasn't," a senior officer of the local police, Santosh Kumar Mishra, said an inquiry has been ordered into the event.
There was a "lot of drama" when the police had gone to evict the family in March, he said. Some of the women had poured kerosene onto themselves and threatened to immolate themselves.
"This time, we wanted to avert such a situation. The court had ordered us to get the family evicted at any cost," he added.
The state police have recently been accused of indulging in excesses in the matter of anti-Romeo squads -- teams formed to protect women from harassment in public places -- and the crackdown on illegal abattoirs.
Expected to crack down on Romeos, a term loosely used for molesters, the police were seen targeting couples in cellphone videos that poured in from various parts of the state. Other clips showed them tonsuring men and forcing them to do squats. Owners of slaughter houses alleged that they were ordered to close shop on unexpected grounds like lack of permit to draw groundwater and dysfunctional CCTV cameras.
The allegations poured in within weeks over takeover by new Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who has made law and order the central focus of his administration. His party, the BJP, has come to power on the promise of good governance.