Police allowed NCP goons to attack me, outrage my modesty: Marathi actor Ketaki Chitale

Marathi actor Ketaki Chitale has moved the Bombay High Court, seeking that her arrest and detention by the Kalwa police on May 14 be declared illegal and in breach of the law.

Chitale’s plea filed through advocate Yogesh Deshpande read that not only was the arrest illegal but even the police remand ordered by the magistrate court was in breach of a Supreme Court. The plea stated that the police should have given her a notice under Section 41A of the Criminal Procedure Code and allowed her to appear before a police officer.

Instead, the plea stated, the day the FIR was registered by complainant Swapnil Netke, she was arrested. Chitale recounted that she got a call from the Kalamboli police station and the policemen asked her to come. “Being a law-abiding citizen, she complied. The officials of the Kalwa Police Station were present there and they took her into custody,” Yogesh Deshpande said.

Chitale said that she did not understand the nitty-gritties of law and when she was asked to sign certain papers at the Kalamboli police station, on the pretext that it was a formality, she again complied.

Chitale stated that while Kalwa police never gave her the notice to attend the police station, they had gone to “Kalamboli with a predetermination to arrest her even before they had any oral interaction with her”. She added, “The sequence of events clearly showed that an officer “competent to effect an arrest” reached Kalamboli in a tearing hurry without any reasonable cause with a predetermination to arrest me.”

Ketaki said that when she was “brought out from the Kalamboli Police station to get into a police vehicle of Kalwa Police, a mob led by a woman leader of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) attacked the police party, assaulted her and also outraged her modesty”.

Chitale stated that she is separately filing appropriate proceedings to seek justice with reference to the said crime committed against her by workers of NCP. Although, being behind the bars even after a month, Chitale says that she is still trying to register FIR against those people but she can show how the police department is trying to “scuttle” her efforts in getting the FIR registered.

Chitale was arrested by Kalwa police after she allegedly uploaded an objectionable social media post about NCP chief Sharad Pawar. Chitale, at present, faces 22 FIRs and 4 non-cognizable offences in Maharashtra because of this one social media post. She had earlier approached the Bombay High Court seeking a stay on the investigation in these cases.