Laurels for young policewoman who fought against 3 men to save teen in UP

All of 23, Suneeta Tiwari has earned the right to call herself a policewoman. For a young unarmed woman to fight off three drunk and lecherous men, one of them a policeman, alone at night to protect a hapless teenager is no mean feat after all.

On Thursday, constable Suneeta, posted at the Mahila Police Station in Lucknow, was on her way home around 10 pm when she saw a teenager being eve teased by three men on a motorcycle. The inebriated men were teasing the girl and pulling her hands. Desperate and in tears, the teenager was crying for help.

"But no one cared to stop and help her," recalls Suneeta, who happened to pass by just then. At the end of her shift, she was dressed in plainclothes.

Call it a cop's instinct, but Suneeta knew better than to just jump in. She first dialed the Mahila Police Station and reported the incident to the inspector in-charge, Kanaklata Dubey, and then placed a second call to the Mahanagar Police Station, which is located barely a kilometre from the scene.

"I then grabbed the bike driver and tried to pull the keys from ignition," says Suneeta. "Before I could, the other two attacked me and pushed me to the ground. They were drunk and tried to grab me," she adds, "but I managed to land a few punches on the two, then nabbed them with their collar and started kicking them". The two assailants were well and truly cornered, but the third had managed to ride away by then.

And then reinforcement arrived, not from the station close by, but from the Mahila police station. The former reached soon after, by when a team of five constables led by inspector Dubey had caught hold of the duo.

When they were taken to the Mahanagar Police Station, it was found out that one of them was an assistant sub inspector at the vigilance cell, Dinesh Singh Bisht. The other was identified as Rahul Saxena, a friend of his. Soon after, the station started getting calls from 'influential persons', demanding that the case be sorted out off the record.

"We were not going to let them get away without any action as it was a matter of the prestige of women," Dubey says, adding that if it weren't for media persons' arrival at the station, the case may indeed have got hushed up. The sub-inspector and his friend are now in jail, booked for assaulting a woman with the intent to outrage her modesty. "They are in jail till September 15. In the next hearing, we will ensure that they get the maximum punishment," says Dubey.

Suneeta, meanwhile, has become a local celebrity in Lucknow. Feted by Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, she has been promised a promotion by him and that her name would be recommended for the President's gallantry award.