Naresh Pakhre at the spot on the
Ulhasnagar skywalk where he was captured on camera as he went around slapping
couples for 'dirtying up' the place
“Naresh,
come here for a minute.”
It
has been an hour since I have been speaking to Naresh Pakhre at the Shiv Sena shakha office in suburban Thane. As a
response to a question I had just posed, 31-year-old Pakhre, a member of the
right-wing political party, is explaining why couples’ “doing dirty things” is
a crime. His sister-in-law, who stays next door to the office, has been popping
in and out for the past few minutes. As she implores him again, Pakhre stops
mid-sentence.
“I
know what you are going to say,” he says.
“No,
come here,” she insists.
“I
have already spoken to him about it.” Pakhre turns his attention to my
cell-phone lying on the table. It’s my turn to reassure her about the interview
being anything but an exercise in sting reportage.
“I
know the recorder is on,” says Pakhre flatly. “And anyway, what’s wrong with
what I am saying?” Abashed, she walks out of the office. A few minutes later,
her husband explains, “We didn’t want to rake this issue up again. The media
comes, pretends that they are looking out for us and then only shows what it
wants to.”
But
Pakhre is keen on setting the record straight. A few minutes later, he points
out to the place where he slapped and shamed two 15-year-olds. It was they who
started it, he claims. Started what, I ask?
“Doing
dirty things.”
On
December 21, 2014, the news channel Times Now aired an undated video showing a
group of people slapping couples found lurking on a skywalk in Ulhasnagar,
nearly 40 kilometres from Mumbai. The incident was dubbed as an act of ‘moral
policing’ done by overzealous Shiv Sainiks. During the course of the day, two of the
culprits were identified as 52-year-old Meena Pakhre and her son Naresh Pakhre.
The latter featured on prime time and launched into passionate self-defence on
being questioned about the act. The vein of his argument: “Would you let your
daughters or sisters do it?”
At
a police station, an act of slapping, more often than not, translates into a
non-cognizable offense. If you belong higher up the food-chain, or if you
happen to be the nephew of the West Bengal chief minister, it becomes an
attempt to murder. As the news coverage snowballed into colourful catchphrases like
‘Ulhasnagar ke Gundey’, Pakhre watched as he was suddenly caught in the eye of
the storm. He confessed to being bewildered by how it all started from a news
channel he had never even heard of.
A
few days after the clip caught the imagination of liberal media, one of the
three couples approached the Central Police Station in Ulhasnagar. According to
the investigating officer, the families of the boy and the girl, in presence of
the two juvenile victims, insisted that they wanted to bury the matters and not
file a complaint against the accused. They stated that their wards’ careers
which would be “ruined” if they chose to go ahead with it, especially in the
wake of the oncoming board exams.
“Had
they been willing to come forward, we were ready to give all our support to the
victims. But here, there was no complaint or complainant. On the basis of this
technicality, we couldn’t take any action against the accused,” said deputy
commissioner of police Vasant Jadhav. By then, Pakhre, too, had submitted an
application asking for the withdrawal of the trending video from social media.
In
the second week of January, I went to Pakhre’s office in Ulhasnagar. A graduate in economics
from a local college, he veered towards construction and now earns a living as
a contractor. A couple
of weeks ago when I had contacted him, he was deeply suspicious of my
intentions. By his own admission, Pakhre has hardly ever ventured out of
Ulhasnagar and felt betrayed by the ways of the media.
Meena
Pakhre is a former member of the Nationalist Congress Party. Over the years,
the mother-son duo tilted towards the ideological stance of the Shiv Sena. Naresh has often campaigned for the Sena candidates during elections
and is a known face among the locals in the vicinity, many of who vociferously
supported his activities when asked about it. DCP Jadhav told me that after his
vigilantism, the Shiv Sena in-charge for Thane district, Rajendra Chaudhary, met
with him and washed their hands off his actions. On his part, Pakhre refuses to
discuss the party reaction and steadfastly maintains that he did it out of his
own accord, not as a Sena affiliate.
“It
saddened me,” he said, referring to the backlash that followed. “I still think
I am right, though maybe I should not have hit them. But like they say, laaton ke bhoot baaton se nahi maante. I
gave them two slaps and they understood just right.”
***
The
Ulhasnagar skywalk has many tentacles that cut across both sides of the railway
station. One of them overlooks the bedroom window of Pakhre’s house. The list
of problems he has been facing since the bridge came up over seven years ago keeps
escalating through the course of our conversation. From allegations of lovelorn
couples getting cosy in front of a balcony of pedestrians, he throws in the
presence of everyone, be it underage pornography viewers, exhibitionists, active
prostitution rings or drug peddling, all of them converging at the railway
bridge. Two hours into the conversation, I visualized the setting as a lawless sin-city
wherein the capeless populace is struggling to come to terms with an
illegitimate baby producing factory.
In
the days leading to the crackdown, Pakhre told me that he was spurred by the
repeated anecdotes about couples of all ages becoming a nuisance to the
passers-by. On November 27, Pakhre, accompanied by his mother and three of
their neighbours, decided to put a cork on the activities. At 12.30 pm, they
started from the end terminating near their doorstep and cornered around 10-12
couples in the next hour.
It
was during their time near the Exit Gate no. 3 in Ulhasnagar (W) that an
unidentified person captured the group in action. Over a three minute duration
of the clip, uploaded on November 18 on YouTube, Pakhre is seen admonishing
three couples standing on the skywalk. One of the couples are the 15-year-olds I
referred to earlier, and the other two are adults. “Are you two married?”
Pakhre can be seen jeering at the latter. The answer doesn’t satisfy him. Two
slaps down, the man folds his hands and seeks forgiveness, promising never to
return.
“We
went for about eight days continuously. During this time, we caught 60-70 such
couples. We asked them for their parents’ numbers and called them up. When they
wouldn’t cooperate, we had to take it from their i-cards,” he added.
For
the mother-son duo, the proximity to the ‘obscenity’ was one of the critical
reasons behind him launching the crackdown. They tell me they are concerned
about the impressionable children who might seek to emulate them in the future.
As was explained to me in unsubtle terms, love, at least the expression of it,
should be restricted within the confines of a house or a hotel. When a girl
indulges in such an act, it’s an assault on the dignity of the male members of
her family (viz. brother and father) who wouldn’t tolerate it in any
circumstances. Pakhre sought to be step into the shoes of this brother out to
prevent his wayward sisters from indulging in these acts. After the successful
completion of the first phase of his crackdown, he now takes credit for
everything from increased attendance in local colleges to the decimation of the
drug mafia.
“If
people are awakened even once, if police and politicians take lessons from
this, our degrading culture might get a lease for life for another 25 to 30
years,” he said.
For
all practical purposes, Pakhre paints his picture as a crusader for all things
skywalk. In what seems like a balancing act of sorts, he is at pains to tell me
that his initiatives extend beyond the attempt at culture-correction.
“Last
year on May 24, my men and I took on the drug addicts on the skywalk,” he told
me. Pakhre and his associates thrashed them, following which an assault case
was filed against him at the Vitthalwadi police station.
“Don’t
think that I have only targeted couples,” Pakhre said earnestly. “When there is
a problem, I don’t send people to police station. I solve matters of home at home.”
Pakhre
knows he shouldn’t have hit the couples. He coats it with the context of
obscenity and reiterates his regrets in no uncertain terms. He alleges that the
couples dismissed his warnings, their acts threatened to corrupt morality and
stood against everything his own sense of modesty stood for. Even as he
repeatedly punctures his defence with partial regrets, he holds the media,
human rights activists and an apathetic administration responsible for his
actions. Buoyed by their support, the couples have started ravaging the walkways
again, he claims. It’s only a matter of time before he will have to bring them
to book. But he has burnt his hands once and knows better than to lash out. There
will be a plan B.
“On
my subsequent visits, I am going to buy flowers, garlands and a hire a pandit. I will call up the girl’s place
and tell her folks, ‘There is a boy ready for you. Don’t worry about a dowry. They
are getting married here. Come here.’ We’ll tell the same to the boy’s family,”
he said.
“We
will start Gandhigiri. Let’s see what the media says now.”
