By Dhananjay Mahapatra 

NEW DELHI: Within 24 hours of Delhi High Court granting bail to riots case accused Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and Asif Iqbal Tanha, Delhi Police moved the Supreme Court seeking quashing of the HC’s order and called it “perverse” and marked by a “misunderstanding of UAPA provisions”.

Claiming that the HC’s perception appeared influenced by social media narratives rather than evidence in the chargesheets against the accused, the police said the HC’s observations that the present cases were registered to suppress dissent were nothing but “insinuations, albeit unfounded and perverse”. The cops sought a stay on the HC orders granting bail to the three accused.

Three voluminous appeals, each running into nearly 300 pages, were prepared overnight by a team of lawyers led by advocate Rajat Nair under the supervision of solicitor general Tushar Mehta to challenge the three judgments by a HC bench of Justices Sidharth Mridul and Anup Jairam Bhambani.

The police said the HC sidestepped the fact that in the riots in north-east Delhi in February 2020, as many as 53 people were killed and many citizens and police officials suffered injuries. “The said riots did not occur on the spur of the moment or due to a fit of communal anger but were pre-planned in multi-layered, multi-organisational fashion,” it said.

The special leave petitions minced no words in criticising the HC judges’ “poor understanding” of UAPA provisions, its play and legislative intent behind the enactment to prevent acts of terror to destabilise the country. “The judgments are perverse, against well-settled principles of law and contrary to legislative intent behind enactment of UAPA,” the cops said. The police said the judgments failed to take into account cogent evidence about a well-planned conspiracy to unleash violence and cause communal discord and the overt and covert acts of all three in giving the conspiracy a shape on the ground.

“Unfortunately, contrary to the evidence on record and the detailed oral and written submission filed, the HC decided the cases on a preconceived and a completely erroneous illusion, as if the present case was a simpliciter case of protest by students… HC completely lost sight of the evidence and statements which were produced before it and rendered judgments discarding the evidence which clearly made out a sinister plot of mass-scale riots being hatched by the respondents along with other co-conspirators.”

“There was a cause and evidence of terrorist activity against the respondent; there was corroborative evidence, however, while applying the legislative mandate, the HC misdirected itself and gave perverse findings to arrive at a conclusion that no case of UAPA was made out. The misdirection of the HC is writ large on its observations in the impugned judgment, wherein, HC has held that the present case was foisted in anxiety to suppress dissent,” they added.

The police said the HC held that provisions of UAPA could only be applied to deal with matters of profound impact on the ‘defence of India’. “This will have far reaching consequences for cases investigated by the NIA and other investigating agencies. The impugned order is thus unsustainable in law and deserves to be stayed,” the police argued. The HC failed to appreciate that the protests planned by the accused were not like ones which reflected political culture or democracy but represented evil, and were geared towards extremely grave consequences as was apparent from the statements of protected witnesses, the police said.

This story was first appeared on timesofindia.indiatimes.com