This is the story of two women, a drunk, and an ineffective police. Caught in the middle is a two-year-old child whose whereabouts have been unknown for a year now.

The Delhi High Court today ordered lie-detector tests on all the players in the case after the police submitted they had made no headway.

On September 4, 2008, two-year-old Anita accompanied her father, Mahendra Singh of Shyam Colony in Budh Vihar, for an evening stroll. Mahendra took the child to a liquor shop nearby, where he drank himself into a stupor. When he returned home the next morning, Anita was not with him.

Anita’s mother, Meena Devi, wrote to Chief Justice A P Shah through lawyer Mithilesh Agarwal, pleading for help in tracing her only child. In the letter, Meena accused the woman who ran the liquor shop, Sheela Sansan, of kidnapping her daughter and selling her in Mumbai. “Please bring my child back to me. I shall be grateful,” Meena Devi wrote .

A Bench headed by Chief Justice Shah took cognizance of the letter, saying, “This case shows how children become easy victims... the child is missing for over a year.”

ACP Rajpal Singh of the Delhi Police told the court today that their investigation had been inconclusive. The Bench then asked the police’s Anti-Kidnapping Cell to conduct lie detector tests on Sheela, Meena and Mahendra Singh.

In their report, the police said repeated questioning of Sheela had yielded no result. “She firmly stands by her version that she has no knowledge about the missing girl and Meena Devi is trying to falsely implicate her,” ACP Singh said. The police report too recommends lie-detector tests to determine which of the women was speaking the truth.

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