The Supreme Court agreed to hear on Monday a petition alleging police excesses during the Jantar Mantar student protest. The plea, mentioning urgency, claimed students faced excessive police action and sought the Court’s immediate intervention.
The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a petition alleging police excesses during the student protest at Jantar Mantar.
A Bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana agreed on Friday to take up the plea, which alleges police excesses against students demonstrating in the national capital, on July 27.
Senior Advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan mentioned the matter, telling the Bench that the petition stood filed and had been assigned a diary number,
“We have filed a plea concerning the student protests. Diary number is generated. There is urgency. Police excess is going against students. Something has to be done… the Court is standing in between.”
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The Chief Justice responded,
“We will hear on Monday.”
Earlier the same morning, from the same Bench, the Chief Justice had rejected as false a body of reporting suggesting that he had refused to list a plea on the police action. His clarification was that no petition had been filed at all that what came before him on July 22 was a letter addressed to him by a lawyer, which could not be treated as an instituted matter absent a formal filing through the registry. He had described the coverage of that episode as irresponsible and reckless.
By Friday afternoon, the position had changed in the only way that mattered procedurally. A petition existed on the record, a diary number had been generated, and the matter was listed on a single sentence of mentioning. What had been characterised in some quarters as a refusal to engage with the subject was, on this sequence, a question of whether anything had been placed before the Court to engage with.
The petition concerns the events of July 20, when the Cockroach Janta Party’s ‘Sansad Chalo‘ march towards Parliament was stopped by the police, who had cautioned that no permission had been granted for it. Demonstrators gathered in large numbers, clashes followed, and allegations emerged of lathi charges, the use of tear gas and violent action against student protesters.
The Delhi Police have denied resorting to excessive force, maintaining that they acted to preserve public order. Multiple FIRs were registered across central Delhi.
The demonstration at Jantar Mantar began last month on a call by the CJP against repeated leaks of examination papers, with the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan as its central demand. It grew substantially after climate activist Sonam Wangchuk joined and began a hunger strike in solidarity.
Wangchuk was subsequently removed from the site and hospitalised by the Delhi Police, who cited his deteriorating condition a step that generated its own litigation before the Delhi High Court, culminating in an order permitting his transfer to a private hospital in Gurugram, where he ended his fast this week.
Monday’s listing means the police action of July 20 will be examined simultaneously at both levels of the judicial hierarchy.
Before the Delhi High Court, a Division Bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia is hearing a batch of petitions alleging excessive force, having issued notice to the Centre and the Delhi Police, directed the preservation of CCTV footage and videography, and observed that the allegations did not concern isolated incidents capable of being remitted to individual complaints.
The same Bench is separately seized of a public interest litigation seeking an NIA investigation into the protests a plea advancing the opposite case, alleging that the agitation was captured by political actors and sustained by foreign funding, claims that remain wholly untested. It also took up a challenge on Friday to the mobile internet shutdown imposed around Jantar Mantar.