By Omar Rashid
New Delhi: The Adityanath-led Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh has strongly defended the right of its police to lodge cases under the state’s controversial anti-conversion law even when the law, on a plain reading of it, only allows victims of illegal conversion or their close relatives to file such complaints.
According to an affidavit submitted by the state government in the Allahabad high court on September 10 in an ongoing legal case – a copy of which is with The Wire – the BJP government has argued that its police officers do indeed qualify as “aggrieved” persons in cases of unlawful conversion.
The government has justified the rampant lodging of suo motu FIRs by the police against unlawful conversion by arguing that it was in the interest of law and order and that the powers granted to a police officer under the erstwhile Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) were not controlled by the section of the UP unlawful conversion law dealing with competency in getting FIRs lodged.
The Durga Yadav case
Can the police lodge FIRs against unlawful conversion on their own without any complainant? Can the police be an “aggrieved person” under the state’s anti-conversion law?
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
