When 22-year-old Nikita Fernandes was heading home on the evening of December 9, she was greeted by a lewd message in the ladies’ compartment of the train she was travelling in — it was an open invitation to the female passengers offering them a free massage apart from a few other unmentionable services.
Disgusted, the fashion-designing student instantly decided to call attention to the sticker and informed Mumbai Police by tagging them on Twitter. “I clicked a picture of the message and put it up on Snapchat. A friend of mine informed me that if I actually told the police about it on Twitter, they would do something about it,” she recalls.
A mainstay of local trains in Mumbai, vulgar graffiti, text and stickers with phone numbers, have cropped up despite the Railways’ several cleanliness drives over the years.
An ad similar to the one Nikita reported
To Nikita’s surprise, not only did the Mumbai Police acknowledge her tweet, they also managed to nab the pervert within 24 hours of her complaint. “They arrested the man and then asked me to come down to Borivili police station and took my complaint down too. The police informed me that the person was from Mira Road and had mental issues.”
Sunchika Pandey, consultant creative for Mumbai Police’s Twitter handle reveals that the key to getting the pervert caught was the fact that he placed his own number on the ad. “There was also a similar complaint that had come to the Borivili police station. There was a number that was provided on the ad, and the concerned authority traced it. They found the persons and detained them,” she explains.
Deven Bharti, joint commissioner of police, law and order, says that the police department didn’t bother with jurisdictions, despite the lewd messages being in a local train. “The complaint was on our Twitter account and we didn’t want to get trapped in jurisdiction issues, so we didn’t work alongside the railway police to track him. The lady was feeling uncomfortable and she shared it; it’s our duty to help her out. He’s a pervert, and we’ll have to trap more and more people like these, so women travelling alone and in groups don’t feel embarrassed,” he asserts.
Evidently, providing safety and security for women has become top priority for Mumbai police. Concurs Sunchika, “Anything related to women coming up on Twitter is given precedence. Just a month and a half ago, there was a case of a pervert flashing himself to a few college girls in an auto in Bandra. The wheels were set in motion even without the women coming into the police station. Action is initiated immediately and in cases like the girls’ in Bandra, a policeman himself becomes the complainant. Investigation was then started based on information and CCTV footage,” she informs us.
Sunchika, however, is quick to add that the Twitter handle can’t be the only place for lodging complaints, “It’s like an online control room. We just guide the complainants to the right authorities. By law, people have to eventually go to the police stations to file FIRs. It’s a legal procedure, not meant to harass people. Nikita, too, eventually went to the station to lodge a complaint.”
Known for its witty posts on obeying traffic rules and being a law-abiding citizen, the Mumbai Police Twitter handle has been a handy tool for the city to lodge complaints for prompt actions. Nikita reveals that while she posted her complaint, she wasn’t sure anything would come out of it. “I honestly didn’t think the police would react to my tweet, since there are so many things that happen around. I’m very impressed,” she says.
The joint commissioner reveals that a lot more women are now coming forward and using Twitter to complain about harassment. “We’re trying to encourage them to approach us. That’s why we post all our detections, so it will urge others to come forward to. In fact, we’ve made arrests in 10-15 similar cases,” he notifies us.
“The idea behind making the Twitter handle was not for image building,” adds Sunchika. “It was the need of the hour, and the Mumbai Police was getting an additional platform to communicate with people. This is a medium that people are using elaborately, and they would want to communicate with us using this. We’re not even a year old and we already have a million followers, so we must be doing something right — and that’s besides the creative posts,” she concludes with a smile.
