Mamata Banerjee backs Kolkata mayor's 'little girl' against her own cops

Debapriya Chatterjee, the niece of Mayor of Kolkata Sovan Chatterjee, has been accused of breaking traffic rules and assaulting a policeman on duty when she was stopped. But she’s now got an unexpected supporter: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. [caption id=“attachment_2263588” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Debapriya Chatterjee. Image courtesy: Twitter @chattydebby[/caption] According to reports, on the night of 22 May, Chatterjee’s car first jumped a signal and hit a pedestrian, and later in the night struck a divider. The Telegraph quotes the police official who had accosted her as saying, “She pushed me and said, ‘Who are you to stop me?’ She said she would get me fired and took away my pocketbook… I told her she couldn’t take the notebook since I was on duty but she said she was the mayor’s niece.” After the second incident the police had to detain Chatterjee and her friends and lodged a complaint against her. The Indian Express reports, “Debapriya, however, lodged a general diary against the police officials for allegedly “misbehaving with her and abusing her”. Meanwhile, police lodged a suo motu complaint against Debapriya and her friends under section 353 (assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty).” But on Tuesday, the West Bengal CM came out strongly in Chatterjee’s defence, blaming the traffic police constable on duty for seizing Debapriya’s license unnecessarily, and saying she was only a ’little girl’. “Why was the girl’s driving license seized by the police?” the chief minister said, adding that there should be a probe which would allow the law to take its own course. Chatterjee on Tuesday also defended herself and told Times Now that she was completely innocent. “I never dropped names or called my immediate family after the incident,” Chatterjee said. She had earlier told The Indian Express earlier  that there was no evidence she was driving under the influence of alcohol and the incident was ‘a trap’  to frame her. Apart from pleading innovence to media outlets, ‘Chatty debby’, as she’s known on Twitter, took on people on the social networking site over accusations they levelled against her. Here are some of her tweets:

@RishMCFC @TimesNow how about you ask the channel if they will sack the journo for doing such a shoddy job? Not even getting my age right..

— Debapriya Chatterjee (@chattydebby) May 26, 2015

More from India

Nepal’s Sushila Karki and her India connection News18 SheShakti 2025: Voices of cinema, sport and music redefine nation-building

And though she may have deleted some other things she told people on Twitter, others had documented it:

While her fate now possibly rests in the hands of the agency that will conduct the probe into the incident, Chatterjee will no doubt draw a great deal of comfort from the fact that she’s got the CM on her side already.