Coming down heavily on the State and the Delhi Police, the Supreme Court on Thursday ordered prosecution of police personnel involved in the midnight crackdown on yoga guru Ramdev and his supporters in June last year saying it was an assault on democracy.
Observing that it was “a glaring example of trust deficit between people and the government”, the court also blamed Ramdev, who was on an anti-corruption fast along with his followers at Ramlila Maidan, for negligence.
“It was a reflection of the might of the State which struck at the foundation of democracy,” a bench of Justice BS Chauhan and Justice Swatanter Kumar noted in its 500 page ruling.
The court said it was a case of police excess. The judges said the police who are meant to ensure peace had themselves breached the peace. The bench also observed that the police and the state could have avoided that tragic incident in which one person died and several others were injured.
“Freedom of speech plays a crucial role in the formation of public opinion on social, political and economic matters. It has been described as a basic human right, a natural right and the like,” the bench observed.
The court directed criminal prosecution of police personnel and Ramdev’s supporters who had behaved violently during the incident.
The bench said the policemen had assaulted victims who were sleeping. There was abuse of power by the Delhi Police and fundamental rights of people were violated, the bench said.
“Sleep is a fundamental and basic requirement without which the existence of life itself would be in peril. To disturb sleep, therefore, would amount to torture which is now accepted as a violation of human right. It would be similar to a third degree methodwhich at times is sought to be justified as anecessary police action to extract the truth out of an accused involved in heinous and cold-blooded crimes,” the bench said.
“A sleeping crowd cannot be included within the bracket of an unlawful category unless there is sufficient material to brand it as such,” the bench added.
“Similarly, the use of teargas shells and use of lathi-charge by the police, though limited, can hardly be justified. In no case, brick-batting by the police can be condoned,” the bench ruled.
It said a person of the stature of Ramdev was expected to urge his supporters to leave the ground. He is bound by legal and moral obligations, it added.
The court has ordered Rs 5 lakh in compensation for victim Rajbala’s next of kin. It has also ordered Rs 50,000 for those were grievously injured and Rs 25,000 for those with slight injuries. The court has ordered that 25 per cent of this compensation will come from Baba Ramdev’s trust.
“I see no reason for the police for not making preferential use of water cannons to disperse the crowd even if they had come to the conclusion that it was an unlawful assembly and it was not possible to disperse the crowd without use of permissible force in the prescribed manner. Even in that event, the police should have made proper announcements. The police had sufficient preparedness to protect itself against such attack and they should have fired the teargas shells to the site from where the bricks were coming rather than in front and on the stage,” the court observed.
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