August 17: A blood-stained and unwashed towel was an unusual evidence brought to the 22-member Parliamentary Committee that visited Ramabai Colony, Ghatkopar today.

Shalini Pagare, however, could not present the clothing that wrapped her 19-year-old son Milind as evidence of the suddenness of the police firing on July 11 afternoon. A bullet had ripped through both his legs and a tear gas shell hit him as he stood watching the police bandobast at his doorstep.

Police allegedly later manhandled Milind and put him in a detection room. He is recovering at the Rajawadi hospital. ``But saheb, we have great expectations from you. People have been shot at above their waists,'' sobbed another woman as she spoke to the Committee on the Welfare of SC/ST and Backward Tribes, enquiring in to the police firing following the desecration of Dr Ambedkar's statue.

It took a while for the colony residents to reopen their wounds and pour their hearts out once again before the members, led by the Orissa MP, Khagapati Pradhani. It was a hurried, half-hour meeting, that left many dissatisfied, and the panel bewildered.

Sonabai Kapadne and her daughter waited long for a short deposition. ``Whatever happened should not be repeated,'' said Sonabai, still shaken by the death of her husband, Sukhdev Kapadne, shot at point-blank range. ``They killed him though he was turning to them with his hands raised,'' she said with a choking voice.

Unable to forgive, almost all the residents who spoke to the members demanded a summary dismissal of the state government. ``How can M Y Kadam, (the State Reserve Police sub inspector who ordered the firing now under suspension) order the firing on innocent and unarmed people? Was he not properly trained?'' asked Indutai Pagare, another local.

Echoing similar sentiments, the Air Corporations SC/ST Employees Association, which conducted an independent probe in to the firing, held the tanker theory as false. A large number of the association's members stay in the colony.

Dr Harish Aher, one of the first persons to rush to the desecration site in his lungi and vest at around 6 am, gave a countdown to the firing episode. ``By the time I returned, after changing my clothes, the shooting had begun,'' he recounted.

At the end of which, the panel members were suitably tuned in to the situation. At the Rajawadi hospital, an anxious Dr M Jagannath, MP and an ENT specialist, asked 40-year-old hand cart puller, Namdev Survade. A bullet tore through his right arm resulting in total nerve palsy, which the MP diagnosed as incurable, leaving Survade without any means of livelihood. ``This is a confidential visit. We shall be submitting our report to the Parliament on our return,'' Pradhani said after meeting the chief secretary and other administrative officials. While the video film on the firing could not be shown due to technical difficulties, sources say that Police Commissioner Subhash Malhotra defended Kadam's initiative at firing at the meeting.

The panel could not meet Chief Minister and the Deputy Chief Minister who were out on a two-day tour.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.