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New Delhi: Criticising police for not arresting a nurse, allegedly the main accused in a 2024 child trafficking case, Delhi High Court has said they cannot “pick and choose”. “Police should clearly state as to whether they want to arrest an accused or not,” the court said, adding that the defence submission that police were “taking practically no action” against Kulvinder Kaur appeared correct. Referring to the police inaction against Kaur, the judge said, “It seems that now the state realises the gravity of the alleged offence. The court observed that merely because police had, “for some unknown reason,” opted not to arrest one accused, it could not “shut its eyes to the gravity of the alleged offence”. Justice Kathpalia was also appalled by the investigators’ lapse in failing to recover the child, noting that the allegedly trafficked girl had “not been recovered/rescued by police” till date.
Justice Girish Kathpalia observed that the court cannot approve of the state’s policy to selectively arrest only some of the accused, leaving others despite the gravity of offence While rejecting the bail plea of another accused. The case, registered at Nangloi police station, concerns the alleged trafficking of a newborn girl under the guise of adoption. The prosecution alleged that co-accused Gayatri impersonated a couple to adopt the infant, the sixth girl child of her biological parents, and later sold her to another accused, Deepika , who allegedly sold her further to unknown buyers. Kaur, whom the prosecution called an unqualified nurse, was accused of facilitating the transactions.
Underscoring the impact of such repeated transfers on the child, the court noted, “Every time the custody of an infant is taken away from her biological mother, followed by the adoptive parent, followed further by other persons as happened in the present case, the infant suffers tremendous dent in her psyche, which gets manifested in her personality at some future stage. That, too, in a case of present kind, provided the trafficked infant is not exploited for multiple reasons by the end purchaser.