‘YOU HAVE NO FAITH IN THE YOUR OWN FORCE’: SC REJECTS PARAM BIR SINGH’S PLEA
The Supreme Court on Friday refused to entertain a plea by former Mumbai Police commissioner Param Bir Singh to shift all cases against him to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) or to any other state, and questioned his lack of faith in a force he served in for 30 years.
Singh had alleged that the state police was prejudiced against him after he claimed that former Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh was involved in corruption. CBI is currently probing the corruption charges Singh levelled against Deshmukh in a letter to Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray this March.
Declining his plea, the bench of justices Hemant Gupta and V Ramasubramanian said: “You are part of Maharashtra cadre IPS [and] served the state for 30 years. It is a shocking allegation that you have no faith in your force.”
Singh, who was represented by senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani, told the court that he filed a complaint dated March 20, 2021, accusing Deshmukh of running a “money collection scheme” through the police department.
Following this, he was shunted to a low-key post in Mumbai Police’s home guards, and a department enquiry was initiated against him. Jethmalani said that the officer in charge of the case against him pressurised him to withdraw the complaint against Deshmukh, and threatened him with several criminal cases.
The court wondered that if a Dgp-rank officer could succumb to pressure, what would happen to others on the force.
Referring to one of the complaints against Singh, Jethmalani told the court that the complainant was involved in five criminal cases, and had now “chosen to turn the gun against the former top cop”. To this, the bench responded: “It is said that persons who live in glass house should not throw stones at others.”
The court also ruled that it could not grant Singh a blanket stay on any further FIRS against him.
“There are several development projects such as the Jevar airport and the Purvanchal Expressway that are nearing completion, and the CM wanted to discuss this with the PM. The party’s performance in the recently concluded panchayat elections and the upcoming state elections were also part of the discussions,” said a functionary aware of the details.
After the meeting, Adiyanath tweeted in Hindi, “Had the privilege of meeting respected Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi to seek his guidance. Heartfelt gratitude to the Prime Minister for providing time and guidance from his busy schedule.”
He also thanked Nadda for “receiving his guidance on various subjects”.
It was not immediately clear what was discussed between Nadda and Adiyanath, who also met Union home minister Amit Shah on Thursday in the Capital.
A second person aware of the developments said Shah suggested that the UP leadership needs to work with consensus and address concerns of factionalism within the state unit. This comes in the wake of allegations that there is growing discontent between the party unit on the issue of caste differences.
Shah’s meeting with Apna Dal leader Anupriya Patel and Praveen Kumar Nishad of the Nishad Party on Thursday have also lent weight to speculation about changes in the council of ministers. The meeting is also seen as the BJP’S attempts to iron out differences between the allies in the state.
“There is talk of accommodating the allies in the state council of ministers. But it all depends on Delhi (the central leadership),” said the second functionary who did not want to be named.
Adityanath’s meetings came amid reports of dissidence in the BJP in UP, which goes to the polls early next year. The party, which hopes to return to power in UP, was attacked by opposition leaders and even some party lawmakers for its handling of the Covid-19 second wave in the state.
The mounting criticism prompted BJP to send a twomember team to Lucknow and hold discussions with state legislators and the chief minister last week, which had initially fuelled speculation of a ministerial reshuffle in the state. The party also performed poorly in recently held rural body polls, failing to clinch majorities in PM Modi’s home seat Varanasi and capital Lucknow. The UP government, however, refuted the criticism and said the Covid situation was brought under control within a week.
Adityanath’s visit to the national capital started a day after Jitin Prasada quit the Congress and joined the BJP. After Adityanath met Shah, Prasada called on the Uttar Pradesh chief minister.
BJP MLC AK Sharma, a former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer who is seen as a trusted hand of Modi, is also in Delhi to meet party leaders and allies.
Though there is no official word on whether there will be a Cabinet expansion in Uttar Pradesh, PTI quoting people aware of the developments said Prasada, who comes from a noted Brahmin family with political heft, and Sharma may be accommodated in the state cabinet in such an eventuality.
start of more defections from BJPS Bengal unit.
However, Banerjee clarified that TMC politicians and workers who left to join the BJP just ahead of the April-may assembly elections will not be taken back.
Roy, once the second-in-command of the TMC, was removed from the post of the party’s national general secretary in February, 2015, sometime after the Narada sting was carried out by investigative journalists where many politicians were allegedly caught accepting wads of cash from a fictitious company. He joined the BJP in November, 2017.
The move to bring him back possibly started when Banerjee at an election rally in late March had termed his conduct as not so bad.
This was in contrast to the chief minister’s other election speeches, where she had branded turncoat TMC members such as Suvendu Adhikari as “Mir Jafars”, after the infamous Bengal general who betrayed Bengal’s Nawab Siraj ud Dowlah in the battle of Plassey against Lord Robert Clives army.
TMC will selectively take back people who crossed over. The aim will be to organisationally weaken BJP but at the same time it will not want too many turncoats back as this would be seen as rewarding dissidence, said Rajat Roy, well-known political analyst and member of the Calcutta Research Group.
Mukul Roy is a special case as he is known to be an organisational brain.
Even before the formal entry of Mukul Roy, BJPS national vice president into Trinamool Congress, BJP leaders reacted angrily to the desertion.
BJP leader Dilip Ghosh reacting to news of Roy’s re-entry, said he was not sure the party would lose anything from the move given that he was unsure whether we gained anything from Roy’s entry three- and-half years back.
The Xinhua report said that the legislation allows prosecutors to act if the slander seriously affects soldiers’ “performance and missions”.
“Prosecutors can file public interest litigation in cases of defamation of military personnel and the infringement on their legitimate rights and interests that have seriously affected their performance of duties and missions and damaged the public interests of society,” th e law adds.
Commenting on the new law, Song Zhongping, a former PLA instructor and Hong Kongbased military affairs commentator said the legislation which also covers families of service personnel was meant to bolster the People’s Liberation Army’s sense of mission.
“Previously, our legal instruments were not complete and this new law will provide more comprehensive protection for the rights and honours of our soldiers,” Song told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.
Chinese state media listed several cases of perceived defamation – mostly involving PLA’S deadly clash with the Indian army in 2020 – that could have hastened the passage of the law that was put up to the NPC in April.
One case was of a 63-yearold man detained by the “…Beijing police after he was found to have slandered martyr Wang Wei and insulted Wang’s wife in a Wechat group earlier in April. Wang was a Chinese air force pilot who died when his fighter jet collided with a US military reconnaissance aircraft in the South China Sea in 2001,” a state media report said.
Prosecutors can file public interest litigation in cases of defamation of military personnel and the infringement on their legitimate rights and interests that have seriously affected their performance of duties and missions and damaged the public interests of society