A freelance American journo Joel Elliott says police beat him in Delhi

India’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) is seized of a complaint by an American journalist Joel Elliott that he was beaten up by Delhi police last week.

Elliot works for a city magazine, and freelances for New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and some other US based publications. He doesn’t appear to have approached the police with his complaint. His allegation is that he became a victim of police brutality in the up-market Nizamuddin area of South Delhi on Tuesday, October 6.

The Delhi police have a different take. According to their version which is widely reported in local media, Elliott was, in fact, returning from a party in an inebriated condition and tried to get into the taxi purposefully, breaking the taxi's windowpanes in the process. He had also, allegedly, thrown one thousand rupee note at the 69-year-old taxi driver and bashed him up when he tried to stop him.

Eliot, who left for home on Friday, Oct 9, has demanded Rs. 500,000 as compensation for ‘the pain and suffering and mental anguish the Delhi Police inflicted upon me’.

In his petition submitted through a lawyer to the Indian human rights body, which is a statutory commission headed by a former chief justice of India, he demanded an inquiry into the ‘attack’

His version of the incident was that he became a victim after he tried to intervene an altercation between at least four policemen and a civilian who ran for cover into the taxi.

The Information & Broadcasting Ministry was alerted to the Elliot’s plight after photographs and reports appeared in the local papers. It sought a report from the Delhi police.

‘There is concern within the government that such an incident should take place with a foreign national, that too a journalist’, a leading English daily quoted an I&B official as saying.

-Asian Tribune –