Ahmedabad: The Gujarat high court on Thursday criticised the police for invoking the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act “to add gravity” to offences, even though there are no utterances of caste slurs or abuses involved, and stayed Rajkot police from taking action in an atrocity-related charge levelled against a driver.
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For the invocation of the act in cases of scuffles, Justice Sandeep Bhatt stated, “This court has repeatedly observed that when a spontaneous incident takes place between two individuals without any specific word regarding the caste of any of the individuals, police authorities register the complaints by invoking the provisions of the act to add gravity to the offences. On bare reading of the FIR in question also, it seems that the same is done.”
The case before the HC involved a cab driver, Matra Susra, who was in a scuffle with another driver at the Rajkot airport. An FIR was registered against Susra under Section 115(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for causing hurt. Since the second driver belonged to the Scheduled Caste, Susra was also charged under the provisions of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
Susra approached the HC for quashing the charges against him. His counsel cited a Supreme Court judgment to argue that the atrocities charges were slapped merely to make the offence more serious and non-bailable, and this amounts to the abuse of the process of law, as there was no caste profiling involved in this incident.
The prosecution vehemently opposed the petition and submitted that there is an eyewitness to the incident, and a prima facie case is made out, and no interference is called for at this stage.
The HC issued notice to the state govt and the complainant, seeking their responses by March 4, and until then, ordered the police to take no coercive action against Susra. However, it permitted the police authority to proceed with the investigation under the offence under the BNS in accordance with the law.