Thirty-two-year-old Sita was sitting on the ground outside Noida’s Phase 2 police station with her two young children – aged three and six – when a friend of her husband spotted him through the window of a departing bus.

“It is him. I just saw,” the friend told her.

Her husband, Jitendar Kumar, 35, had stepped out to meet friends at a market while Sita was at a chemist buying medicine. He never came back. According to Sita, he was picked up by police amid a crackdown following violence that broke out during worker protests in Naya Gaon the previous day.

After protests by factory workers in Noida turned violent on Monday, April 13, the Gautam Buddh Nagar police detained hundreds of people. Police Commissioner Laxmi Singh said over 396 individuals had been arrested and seven FIRs registered, while also pointing to the possibility of a “syndicate”. But for the families of some of those detained – many of them workers from the industrial belt in Sectors 83 and 84 – the more pressing question has been a simpler one: where are their loved ones?

Newslaundry spoke to a few families outside the Phase 2 police station and in Naya Gaon, about a kilometre away. Some said they had received little to no information from police about the whereabouts or status of the detained. The police did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Cops didn’t let us inside’

Kumar works at a company called Morning Sport and earns Rs 12,000 a month. Since his alleged arrest, his wife and friend have been sitting outside the Phase 2 station waiting for answers.

“I had come at 2 pm but the police did not let us inside,” Sita claimed. “Two female police officers were........

© newslaundry