Guwahati: A local court in lower Assam’s Barpeta district has pulled up Assam Police for registering “false” case against Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani and “abusing the process of the court and the law”.
While granting bail to Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani on Friday in an assault case, the Barpeta District and Sessions court warned the Assam Police against “converting our hard-earned democracy into a police state”.
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“Converting our hard-earned democracy into a police state is simply unthinkable and if the Assam Police is thinking about the same, the same is perverse thinking,” said Barpeta District and Sessions Judge Aparesh Chakravarty in the order.
The court also urged the Gauhati High Court to direct the police force to “reform itself”.
The court said the High Court should consider directing “each and every police personnel engaged in law and order duty to wear body cameras, to install CCTV cameras in vehicles while arresting an accused or taking an accused to some place for recoveries of goods or other reasons, and also install CCTV cameras inside all police stations.”
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These measures should be considered to “prevent registration of false FIR like the present one and to give credibility to the police version of occurrences like the arrest of accused persons and the accused persons attempting to escape from police custody at midnight, while the accused was allegedly leading the police personnel to discover something, and the police personnel firing and killing or injuring such accused, which has become a routine phenomenon in the state,” it said.
The court directed that a copy of the order be sent to the Registrar General of the High Court for placing it before the Chief Justice “to look into this aspect and consider whether the matter can be taken up as a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) to curb the ongoing police excesses in the state”.
The Dalit leader was arrested on charges of assaulting a woman police officer on April 25 moments after he was granted bail by a court in Kokrajhar in a case over tweets on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He was first arrested on April 20 by the Assam Police from Gujarat’s Palanpur town and flown to Guwahati the next morning following a complaint filed by a BJP leader in Kokrajhar district over a tweet against Modi.
The court observed that the assault case against Jignesh Mevani was “manufactured” to hold him in detention for a longer period, abusing the process of the court.
“No sane person will ever try to outrage the modesty of a lady police officer in presence of two male police officers and there is nothing in the record to hold that the accused Shri Jignesh Mevani is an insane person,” district and sessions judge Chakravarty said in his bail order.