Cop who led probe in Asaram rape case received 2,000 threat letters
Ajay Pal Lamba probe in Asaram rape case received 2,000 threat letters. Senior police officer Ajay Pal Lamba received more than 2,000 threatening letters and hundreds of phone calls as he was the top cop in the investigation in the rape case against self-styled godman Asaram. A special court in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur on Wednesday convicted Asaram of raping a minor girl at his Jodhpur ashram in 2013. Asaram could be sentenced to life imprisonment. The quantum of sentence is yet to be pronounced. “The letters carried abuses and threatened they would kill my family if anything happened to Asaram. My phone would not stop ringing and I stopped receiving calls from unknown numbers. The letters stopped only when I shifted to Udaipur,” says Lamba, a 2005 batch Indian Police Service officer. Lamba, now the superintendent of police (anti-corruption bureau) in Jodhpur, stopped sending his daughter to school for a while and his wife would not step out of their house. He adds that one of the accused confessed that his next target was Chanchal Mishra, the then deputy superintendent of police with Jodhpur Police and investigating officer in the case. In addition, the tricky part was picking up Asaram from his ashram in Indore as well as ensuring his supporters don’t create a law and order situation in Jodhpur and establishing evidence against him as the first information report was lodged five days after the incident. Asaram failed to appear before the team of policemen from Jodhpur and his arrest was a monumental task for the department. “When my 11-member team went to deliver a summon notice to the Asaram at his ashram in Madhya Pradesh, they faced a mob of about 8,000 people. My team was shoved and it took them 10 hours just to be able to deliver that piece of paper,” Lamba says. The 77-year-old Asaram was also booked under sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, and the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. He has been in the Jodhpur Central Jail for the last 56 months. “He requested that he be taken by flight and the police agreed. During the night, he was talking to his kids in Sindhi and asked them to amass 25,000 of his supporters by morning. ‘I’ll see how they’ll take me then’, he said on the phone. One of my men understood Sindhi and his plan was foiled,” Lamba says. Asaram was brought to Jodhpur and put in a government guest house. “When I entered the room, he was sitting on a sofa. I told him to get off and sit on the floor. The very moment he confessed that he made a mistake,” Lamba says. -PTC News
