Kolkata:
The son of the domestic help from Bengal, allegedly murdered by the wife of a Bahujan Samaj Party MP in Delhi, has said that when he reached the capital to see his mother's body, he ended up spending two nights in the quarters attached to the MP's house and he was so afraid for his own life that he fled and came back to his home at Duperia village near Kolkata on Saturday.
Now state government and local panchayat officials are trying to send some young men from the village to Delhi to claim the body and perform the last rites. The son is too traumatized to go back to Delhi and see his mother for the last time, claim her body or perform the last rites.
In fact, 27-year-old Shahjan Ali believes he is lucky to be alive. He went to Delhi last Tuesday to see the body of his dead mother, the 45-year-old domestic help allegedly murdered by BSP MP Dhananjay Singh's wife Jagriti. At the local police station, the MP's men, mostly BSP workers, took charge of him and kept him for two nights on the premises of the very house where his mother had been killed.
Shahjan was shocked and traumatized. "I was with people who had killed my mother at the place where they killed her. I couldn't make out who was police who was murderer or criminal. So I thought I might be killed like my mother, so I fled," he said.
His wife, Fatima Bibi, added, "If he followed up the case, things would be difficult for them. They are big leaders. They thought if they could kill him, then the case of his mother's murder would not be pursued, they wouldn't go to jail."
A daily wager, Shahjan had last spoken to his mother three months ago. Her job with the MP was her first in Delhi. She had said she would come home after Diwali. But that was not to be. Shahjan tried to see her body but got no help from the police. On Thursday, he told the BSP workers and the police that he was going to get some food and fled, returning to Kolkata on Saturday.
"The police should have let me see my mother. They did not. They said I should stay at the police station and eat here but they didn't check where I was staying, eating," lamented Shahjan. "I didn't get to seem my mother for the last time."
After his harrowing experience, after his mother's horrific death, son Shahjan has become stoic, almost numb with distress. He doesn't have the wherewithal, he says, to follow-up the legal case against the BSP MP and his wife. He is leaving to the government to do what it thinks best.
But his mother's friends and relatives in this little village are angry. Says Mamoni, the murder victim's niece, "How could a woman torture her so badly? She should be given the harshest punishment."
The victim's daughter-law, Fatima Bibi, is furious. "She should be given the death sentence or such punishment that if she lives she can never do anything like this again," she says.
Shahjan has refused to go to Delhi again so local leaders are trying to send some village youth to Delhi to perform the last rights. The wait for justice will then begin.