Four centuries later, as a bulldozer stopped in front of Kotwali police station in UP’s Siddharthanagar and a band of bewildered cops tried to make sense of what was happening, the word “leveller” resonated in more ways than one.
The irony wasn’t lost on a bemused crowd of onlookers as the bulldozer laid its “icy hand” on the police station’s boundary wall and gate, listed among 55 illegal structures that the administration had set out to demolish to reclaim govt land for a road whose span had shrunk by more than half due to encroachment.
The men in khaki seemed all the more surprised as they had been part of Sunday’s drive, little knowing that the police station’s wall was among the structures to be razed.
Not just thana, part of local panchayat office also razed
The demolition action expectedly met with resistance from the cops. “How can you demolish a portion of our police station without a written order?” station house officer Santosh Tiwari demanded to know from the officials leading the team.
“If we are demolishing illegal structures and the police station is among them, how can we make an exception?” replied additional district magistrate Umashankar Singh, accompanied by subdivisional magistrate Lalit Kumar to the site.
The SHO called circle officer Arun Kant Tiwari next as the ‘police vs administration’ matchup continued, watched with particular interest by some who had already lost portions of their properties to the bulldozer action.
When one of the cops asked ADM Singh why the tehsil office’s boundary wall across the street had not been targeted, he decided it was time to “prove the administration’s commitment to fairness”.
The bulldozer hurtled across the street to bring down a 100-metre span of the tehsil’s southern boundary wall. Amid cheers from the crowd, the bulldozer returned to the police station.
A call from district police chief Prachi Singh finally broke the deadlock.
Kotwali police station wasn’t the only official structure to be targeted for encroachment. A portion of the local Panchayat Bhawan was demolished too. District magistrate Raja Ganapathy R said the administration had been trying to rid Khajuria Road of encroachments since 2017. “The road was 6m wide before demolition. Now, it’s 13m.”