SC to hear plea for CBI probe into Mathura violence

The Supreme Court will on Tuesday hear a plea by a BJP leader seeking a CBI probe into the violent incident in Mathura that resulted in the death of 29 people, including two police officers, and considerable damage to public property.

The apex court vacation bench, comprising Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose and Justice Amitava Roy, agreed to hear the matter on Tuesday after counsel Kamini Jaiswal mentioned it and requested an urgent hearing.

The violence took place on June 2 in Mathura in Uttar Pradesh when the police attempted to clear a massive encroachment of Jawahar Bagh public park by the members of Swadhin Bharat Vidhik Satyagrah on the direction of the Allahabad High Court.

The violence claimed the lives of 29 people, including a Superintendent of Police and a Station House Officer (SHO), while another 23 police personnel were injured.

Petitioner Ashwini Upadhyay, who is a member of the Delhi unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said the CBI enquiry was necessary to find out the root cause of the Mathura incident and possible "nexus among the executive, legislatures and the extremist group".

The central government was ready to hold a CBI inquiry into the incident but Uttar Pradesh government was not recommending the same, the petition contended.

Swadhin Bharat Vidhik Satyagrah was formed by a breakaway group of the followers of the religious leader Jai Gurudev, who had died in 2012, it said.

Appearing for Upadhyay, counsel Kamini Jaiswal told the court that there were media reports about destruction of evidence.

She said that besides loss of human lives, 200 vehicles were burnt and a large number of gas cylinders had been destroyed in a fire that broke out during the violence.

The petition also alleged that Ram Vriksh Yadav, the leader of Swadhin Bharat Vidhik Satyagrah who used to be a follower of Jai Gurudev, was running a parallel government with the connivance of powerful people in the Uttar Pradesh government.

"It is believed by local residents that Yadav was very close to some of the ministers of the Uttar Pradesh government, which is why the local administration was unwilling to act against him," the petition said.

That is an obvious ground for handing over the investigation into the violent incident to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), it said.

Besides a CBI probe, the petition sought direction to the central government to frame a uniform policy for compensation to the families of the deceased in such situations.

The petition said that in 2014 the Swadhin Bharat Vidhik Satyagrah launched a march from Sagar in Madhya Pradesh to Delhi in support of its demands that the existing political system be overhauled and the British-era administrative structure be abandoned.

In the course of their journey from Sagar to Delhi, in April 2014, 500 members organised a demonstration in Mathura. The local administration had given them permission to demonstrate at Jawahar Bagh public park for only two days.

But the demonstrators since then squatted in the park and gradually converted it into their headquarters.

By 2016, there were about 3,000 squatters and Jawahar Bagh was turned into a quasi-republic with its own constitution, penal code, judicial system, prison and army, says the petition by the BJP leader.

--IANS

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