Roadside Romeos being punished during Operation Lafanga. Picture by Bhola Prasad

Jamshedpur, Sept. 7: Police today blew the whistle on a gang of whistling road Romeos in the steel city.

The action, in fact, was a part of their newest initiative, “Operation Lafanga”, which was launched today to rein in on the growing menace of eve-teasers around the city.

The operation tasted success right at the outset as the men in khaki trapped five men, all in their early 20s, for allegedly passing lewd remarks at a woman on a bus on the Telco-Sakchi route.

The bus had just rolled out of Nildih when the five men — Avtar Singh, Manjeet, Gurdeep, Harjeet and Roshan Singh — had gone ahead with business as usual, making a few passes and obscene comments at the salwar-kurta clad woman standing next to them.

Only this time, the woman turned out to be a policewoman in a civilian dress, who passed on the message to her colleagues waiting on the road. The bus had hardly moved on a few kilometres when the police, led by deputy superintendent of police Rajiv Ranjan and inspector Birendra Kumar Yadav, intercepted it at the RD Tata roundabout.

The passengers were all asked to alight and the lady asked to identify the offenders.

By the time Avtar and his friends, all residents of different areas under the Golmuri police station, figured out the bait dangled by the police to bring them to books, they were cooling their heels behind the bars.

According to the DSP, the men are all school dropouts. “We have lodged a case of eve-teasing against them and forwarded them to judicial custody,” he said. “Since the news of their arrest spread, other miscreants have started behaving them. So we’ve called called off the drive for the day. However, we shall resume it soon,” Ranjan further said.

The DSP added that the drive was set off by an outpour of complaints against eve-teasing from bus operators and passengers on the Sakchi-Telco, Baridih-Sakchi and Burma Mines-Sakchi routes. “All the police stations on the route were alerted and fresh recruits were sent on the buses in civilian dresses for the drive,” Ranjan said.

The accused, however, pleaded innocence. “The culprits have escaped and the police have caught us,” one the them said.