SC to hear Shaheen Bagh matter on March 23

The Supreme Court on Wednesday adjourned till March 23 hearing on pleas seeking removal of the crowd protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) at Shaheen Bagh area in the national capital.

A division bench headed by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and also comprising KM Joseph said that they have to look into the road closure issue.

"We are informed that there are certain unfortunate issues that happened," Justice Kaul said.

The apex court also refused to interfere with the application, filed by Chandrashekhar Azad and social activist Bahadur Abbas Naqvi, seeking court-monitored SIT probe into the alleged Delhi riots observing that the Delhi High Court is looking into the matter.

The top court had on Tuesday agreed to hear the application about the recent violence in northeast Delhi over the CAA.

The interlocutors, appointed by the top court to engage with the anti-CAA protestors at Shaheen Bagh and convince them to demonstrate at an alternate location, had submitted their report in a sealed cover on Monday.

The top court had last week appointed senior advocates -- Sanjay Hedge, Sadhana Ramachandran and former bureaucrat Wajahat Habibullah -- as interlocutors to talk to the protestors.

A public interest litigation (PIL) in the matter, filed by Nand Kishore Garg and Amit Sahni through their lawyer Shashank Deo Sudhi, sought appropriate directions to the Centre and others concerned for removal of protestors from Shaheen Bagh near Kalindi Kunj.

The petition seeks appropriate direction to the respondents, including the Centre, for laying down "detailed, comprehensive and exhaustive guidelines relating to outright restrictions for holding protest/agitation" leading to obstruction of the public space.

Thousands of people, including a large number of Muslim women, have been staging a sit-in protest at Delhi's Shaheen Bagh area since mid-December last year against the CAA and the proposed National Register of Citizens.