Some videos are loud. This one isn’t. A man sits on a chair. A woman in uniform leans in and delivers the worst kind of news. And for a few long seconds, nobody says anything.
Delhi Police released the clip on Sunday, October 11. Within hours it had turned a private grief into a very public argument. Let me be honest, I watched the description play out in my head more than once, and I still don’t know what to do with it.
The Moment the Video Captures
What the footage shows
According to reports, the clip runs about one minute and 45 seconds. Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijeet Dipke is seated in a room while he’s in preventive detention. A woman police officer informs him that his grandmother has died. The officers say they’re sorry. Dipke places both hands on his lowered head, and after a few tense seconds he says, “I see.”
That’s the whole emotional core of it. No shouting, no dramatic music. Just a young man absorbing something enormous.
Who his grandmother was
The woman who died was Savitribai Shankarrao Dipke, 85, his paternal grandmother. She passed away around 11:30 am on Saturday, October 10, at the family home in Santuk Pimpri village in Maharashtra’s Hingoli district. By then, Dipke was caught up in the day’s heavy security around the CJP’s Jantar Mantar protest. He’d reportedly been detained at the airport after his flight landed.
Two Very Different Accounts
What Delhi Police say
The police released the video to answer CJP’s claims that he wasn’t properly told. DCP Neha Yadav said officers approached him as soon as they learned of the death and offered all possible assistance. According to her, they sensitively asked whether he needed help with flights, phone calls, or anything else, and repeatedly asked whether he wanted to speak to his parents. He declined, she said. Other reports add that officers offered to arrange a flight or bus ticket to Hingoli, plus water.
What Dipke and CJP say
And that’s where it gets interesting, because Dipke doesn’t dispute that he was told. He disputes everything around it. After his release, he said he’d asked police to let him call his cousin, who lives with his grandmother in the village, and requested his phone for just two minutes. He says they refused. He also says he wasn’t allowed to call his lawyer.
Then came the part that stung hardest. Dipke alleged that at 3:30 am police asked him to call his father and tell him he’d been arrested and would soon be going to jail. “The same father who has just lost his mother,” he wrote on X.
CJP’s Ashutosh Ranka went further at a press conference, calling the way it was handled “inhuman” and describing the detention as illegal. Dipke’s mother, Anita Dipke, said the family couldn’t reach him and that Delhi Police was lying. Reports say he missed his grandmother’s funeral.
How the two sides line up
| Point | Delhi Police | Dipke / CJP |
|---|---|---|
| First | Officers informed him promptly and offered help | He was told, but his requests were ignored |
| Second | He declined offers of tickets, calls and contact with parents | He asked for his phone to call his cousin and was refused |
| Third | The video is proof of a sensitive approach | A lawyer’s call was denied too |
| Fourth | No mention of a 3:30 am call | Police asked him at 3:30 am to tell his father he’d be jailed |
| Fifth | Assistance offered for travel to Hingoli | He couldn’t reach family in time |
What the Video Can and Can’t Tell Us
Real limits to one clip
Here’s the thing. A 105-second recording is powerful, but it’s also narrow. It shows the moment of notification. It doesn’t show what Dipke asked for before or after, whether his phone was within reach, what happened at 3:30 in the morning, or how many hours passed before he could actually leave. That’s exactly the gap the two sides are fighting over.
So both can be partly true. Officers can be polite on camera, and a detained person can still feel boxed in by rules he couldn’t bend. Only a fuller record, or an independent look, would settle it.
The grief underneath it all
And yeah, I keep coming back to that image. Hands on his head, silence, then “I see.” Whatever you think of the CJP, the protest, or the police, that’s a grandson learning his grandmother is gone while strangers watch. Nobody wins in that room.
Where the Row Goes From Here
A timeline of the weekend
| Run | When | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| First | Saturday, 11:30 am | Savitribai Dipke dies at home in Hingoli |
| Second | Saturday, afternoon | Dipke detained as CJP’s Jantar Mantar protest is blocked |
| Third | Saturday, in custody | Police inform him of the death, per the video |
| Fourth | Sunday, 3:30 am | Dipke says police asked him to call his father and say he’d been arrested |
| Fifth | Sunday | Released, press conference, police release video, he leaves for Maharashtra |
The political aftershock
After his release, Dipke headed to his native village and promised the CJP wouldn’t back down. He called October 10 the “beginning of the end of this dictatorship.” The party’s critics have pounced on the video as proof that the CJP exaggerated, while supporters say the clip is being used to distract from what they call a heavy-handed crackdown on the day.
Reports also say the police explained the denial of permission for the protest by pointing to past conduct, which is yet another thread in a very tangled week.
The honest takeaway
I’d rather not hand you a neat verdict, because I don’t have one. What I do know is that the clip is real, the grief is real, and the dispute over what came before and after it is very much unresolved. If you’re sharing this online, maybe share it gently. A family lost someone, and in the middle of all the shouting, that part shouldn’t get buried.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here's what to know about the Delhi Police video involving Abhijeet Dipke, his grandmother's death, and the allegations surrounding his detention.