By Omar Rashid
New Delhi: In a scathing, and perhaps unprecedented, indictment of the Uttar Pradesh police, a court in Bareilly, while acquitting two Hindu men of unlawful conversion charges, has ordered legal action against a bunch of police officers in the district for falsely implicating the duo on the basis of a baseless complaint by a self-styled Hindutva cow activist.
The Wire is in possession of the court verdict and case FIR. One of the accused men, Abhishek Gupta worked as a CT scan technician at the Rohilkhand Medical College in Bareilly from 2007 till his arrest in 2022, causing him to lose his job.
The Bareilly court has directed the senior superintendent of police of the district to take “appropriate legal action” against the then station house officer, two case investigating officers and the circle officer (deputy superintendent of police) for lodging the FIR against the two men “under some pressure,” on the basis of a “baseless, unfounded, fabricated and fantastical” story.
Additional sessions judge Gyanendra Tripathi held the police guilty of making a “failed attempt” to give the fabricated story a “legal form”. The “actual culprits” in the unlawful conversion case were the complainant, his associated witnesses, the station house officer who authorised the FIR, the investigator and the Circle Officer who approved the chargesheet in the matter, said judge Tripathi.
Significantly, the court handed the two acquitted the option of filing a civil suit against the “guilty” policemen, the complainant and the witnesses and seek appropriate compensation for the “malicious prosecution.”
‘FIR lodged by police under some pressure’
The court also declared the FIR “null and ineffective”, ruling that the complainant Himanshu Patel, who on social media describes himself as an activist of the Hindu Jagran Manch Yuva Vahini, had no locus to get the FIR lodged in the first place since he was neither a victim of unlawful conversion or a relative of a victim.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.