PIL filed against Karamveer Singh and Brijlal

PIL filed against Karamveer Singh and Brijlal

A Public Interest Litigation has been filed today (17/01/2011) in Allahabad High Court, Lucknow bench by Institute for Research and Documentation and Social Sciences (IRDS), a non-government organization in the Divya and Sheelu cases. Union of India, through the Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, CBI, State of Uttar Pradesh through the Principal Secretary, Chief Minister Office and Principal Secretary (Home), DGP, UP, CB-CID, UP, Karamvir Singh, DGP and Brij Lal, ADG (Law & Order and Crime) have been made the respondents in this case. Asok Pandey is the advocate counsel for the petitioner.

IRDS is of the strong view that the real justice in both cases is still far away and that the real accused are not the lower police officials but Karamvir Singh, DGP, UP and Brij Lal, the ADG (Law/Order and Crime). It feels that the DGP and ADG (Law/order, crime) deliberately and intentionally overlooked their assigned responsibility and played active parts in shielding the real accused and when the matter blew out of proportion, they are trying to save their skin by taking action against subordinate police officers.

Dr Nutan Thakur, Secretary, IRDS says in the PIL that in both cases these two officers just kept waiting and watching the crimes of wrongful framing of evidence, non-registration of FIR and non-action against the real accused being committed. She has quoted section 36 of CrPC about powers and responsibilities of superior police officers and section 4 and section 23 of the Police Act 1861 which fixes the duties, responsibilities and administration of the State police to the DGP. Dr Thakur has also quoted section 29 of the Police Act and section 166 of IPC about penalties for neglect of duty and for knowingly disobeying any direction of the law to cause injury to any person. She has also referred to section 32 of IPC related with illegal omissions.

Based on these facts, Dr Thakur says in the petition that it was the direct responsibility of Karamvir Singh and Brij Lal to perform their duty as per law and to take appropriate actions.  The petition says that today there are so mechanisms like morning briefing of senior officers by the district officers, reports by the Intelligence Department, an active media, 24x7 news channels and a Public Relations Officer (PRO) in the DGP office. Hence it is very easy to understand that the true information about both these cases must have reached the DGP and the ADG (Law/order and crime) immediately.  Thus it was the basic duty of these two senior officers to provide proper supervision and to transfer the Divya case to CB-CID immediately, when so many allegations were being made against the Kanpur police and to get at least the FIR registered in the Sheelu case as soon as the matter came to their knowledge.

Hence, the PIL demands enquiry into the roles of Karamvir Singh and Brij Lal, as heads of UP Police regarding both their dereliction of duty and their criminal omissions and commissions. It feels that CB-CID will not be able to properly probe and investigate the roles of their senior Police officers and hence has prayed to transfer both these cases along with all the related cases against police officers registered presently or subsequently to CBI for investigation or at least to some Special Investigation Team (SIT), supervised by a capable and efficient retired UP cadre IPS officer. IRDS has suggested the names of Prakash Singh, Ishwar Chandra Dwivedi, Sri Ram Arun or SVM Tripathi as a few possible alternatives. It has prayed to form a Judicial enquiry committee under a retired High Court Judge to enquire into these two cases in great details, including the role of the senior police officers including the DGP and ADG (law/order and crime), the amount of compensation to be given to the victims in the two cases and the persons from whom to charge these compensation amounts.

Dr Nutan Thakur,
Secretary,
IRDS,
Lucknow
94155-34525
--
Palash Biswas
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