Vipashyana (extreme right in blue) and Ayashna at the chief minister’s janata darbar in Patna on Monday. Picture by Ranjeet Kumar Dey

Patna, Sept. 5: Chief minister Nitish Kumar saw three families knocking at his door, pleading for justice, amid hundreds of visitors who came to his janata darbar today.

A family, now dwindled to two small girls, wants their father, who is in jail for allegedly burning their mother to death, to be hanged. Another family, comprising two teenage girls, wants to save their father, who has been allegedly implicated in a case after he blew the whistle, which in turn, ensured the suspension of a government employee. And in the third case, a mother, whose daughter was killed by her husband for dowry, is finding it hard to prove to men in uniform that the one killed was her daughter, a fact that the police deny.

Motihari girls Vipashyana (13) and Ayashna (7), whose father Amitabh Srivastava, a sergeant in the Indian Air Force, is presently in jail being an accused in the murder of his wife Kiran, came to Nitish, alleging that the police were not showing any interest in arresting their paternal grandmother Sharda Devi, grandfather Surendra Nath Prasad and paternal aunt Archana Devi, who were presently absconding.

The girls came to the darbar accompanied by their maternal grandmother Suryamukhi Sharan.

“My father had an affair with another woman and used to physically torture our mother all the time. On June 12, he and the three others collectively burnt my mother after dousing her with kerosene. She succumbed to her burn injuries at a Patna-based burns hospital on June 18. While our father was arrested and sent to jail on June 20, the three others are still absconding. We want their arrest as soon as possible,” the two sisters said.

If these children were smitten by bitter revenge, Mona Kumari (19) and Kumari Shreya (21) were hell-bent on saving their father.

“Our father Ashok Kumar Sharma is employed as a supervisor with the health department in Gaya. He had taken help of the Right to Information (RTI) Act and gathered information about the misdeeds of a department clerk, Kamlesh Sharma. The report submitted by my father triggered Sharma’s suspension. Thereafter, to take revenge, Sharma and a nurse, Pooja Kumari, implicated our father in a false rape case. Please help my father,” they pleaded.

Amid all this, 50-year-old Hemanti Devi stood in one corner weeping silently.

A resident of Misri Chowk at Naubatpur in Patna rural, Hemanti said she was tired of proving one simple point to the police.

“My daughter Savita was married three years ago to Pappu Paswan, a resident of Sasua village under Dhanarua police station. Pappu’s family used to pressurise Savita for dowry. Last Diwali, they killed my daughter. Her body was recovered from Sikandarpur area of Bihta. But the police just do not believe that my daughter is dead. They say she fled,” she said. The woman was carrying two pictures, one in which her daughter was getting married and the other in which her body was lying in an empty field.

“How can a mother fail to identify her own daughter? The man who killed her is roaming free and the police are claiming that the corpse was not of my daughter but of someone else. Why will I run from pillar to post for one year for someone else? It is but obvious that the police want to hush up the case and for that they are being given a heavy sum of money. I plead to the chief minister for help,” she wept.