More Chandigarh women than men have assaulted cops on duty in 4 years

Of 107 people who have been arrested for the crime in the city in the past four years, 56 are women.
The Monday evening incident in which two drunk women in their 20s assaulted a traffic cop after he apprehended them for jumping a signal is not an isolated one.
In the past four years, more than 50% cases of people roughing up UT police officials on duty have women named as the accused.
According to data provided by Chandigarh Police, 107 people have been arrested for assault on or causing hurt to a public servant to deter them from performing their duty between 2014 and May 2017.
Of these, while 51 accused were men, as many as 56 were women. This year, three women have been arrested for the crime so far. All of them later got bail.
Two sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) apply in such cases. While Section 353 pertains to the action of assault or criminal force, Section 332 covers the impact, i.e. causing hurt to the public servant attacked. Both sections cover officials on duty.
In 2016, eight women were arrested in five cases, while the number stood at as high as 37 in 2015. In 2014, there were eight women who were arrested for the crime.
In cases of drunken driving, too, city women have found themselves on the wrong side of law. In 2016, 23 women were challaned after being caught driving in an inebriated condition, while till May this year, six women have been fined.
Commenting on the trend, UT senior superintendent of police (SSP) Eish Singhal said: “Each citizen must respect law, be it a woman or a man.”
Law too lax for women, says roughed-up cop
Monday was like any other day for head constable (traffic) Manjit Singh, till he saw two women jumping the signal. Deployed near the Sector-43 bus stand as usual, the cop gave their Maruti Suzuki Swift car a chase in a PCR vehicle and finally caught them as their car got stuck in traffic near the district courts.
What followed, Manjit Singh says, he can’t ever forget. “Not just I, my whole family is upset and in fact in shock. We feel embarrassed after the video of the two drunk women assaulting and abusing me has gone viral,” the head constable told HT on Thursday.
The video shows the woman driver starting an argument with the cop. Going on to create a further scene, she allegedly went on to smash a beer bottle that she had been carrying in the car on her own head. The accused did not stop there and went on to tear the cop’s uniform.
“I believe the government shows too much laxity when it comes to framing law for crimes involving women accused. They are given too much freedom in the name of rights . The women abused and manhandled me, but the police did not even have the authority to arrest them as the incident took place in the evening. Why such discriminatory laws when women are equal to men in every field?” he said.
The accused were arrested from the main gate of the Sector 43 bus stand on Tuesday afternoon and were later produced before court, where they got bail.
Singh said if he were not in his uniform, he wouldn’t have allowed the accused to hurl abuses at him. “The woman staged a drama by hitting herself with a beer bottle. Blood was oozing out of her neck and even a hand. She was doing all this so that she could claim I had injured her. At least one woman, who is married, should have been jailed to set an example. But they were let off after furnishing a bail bond,” he said.