Mumbai: Early Sunday morning, four youngsters with brooms in their hands hit the streets of Thane city in Maharashtra. And then for seven hours on a holiday, all they did was to clean the dirty roads.
They weren’t voluntarily being good citizens and doing their bid for a clean India. The young men were undergoing their first day of punishment for molesting a girl and attempting to murder the man who tried to save her.
Last week, the Bombay High Court had quashed the case against accused Ankit Jadhav, Suhas Thakur, Milind More and Amit Adkhale and directed them to instead do community work.
The accused had moved the court demanding the case be set aside, as they had reached an “amicable settlement” with the victim.
As the woman confirmed the development in court, the bench quashed the case, but directed that under the police’s supervision, the accused sweep public roads for 6 months, reported NDTV.
“We made a mistake and we are repenting it. We will never do this again. It is also a message for anyone else not to do what we did,” Thakur said.
During Dusshera last year, the men had molested a woman and were under the influence of alcohol. When they were stopped by another man, they hit him with iron rods and were booked for attempt to murder. When the DJ stopped playing the music, they also thrashed him.
“Definitely we regret what happened. On one side we are happy that we are serving our country and on the other hand we are feeling guilty,” Jadhav explained.
The four have also been asked to pay Rs. 5,000 to the Tata Memorial Hospital.