The Supreme Court on Wednesday came down heavily on the Gautam Budh Nagar administration for issuing a preventive notice to a 20-year-old law student for allegedly spreading “anti-government propaganda” and inciting fellow students to join protests at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, saying no executive magistrate could have issued such an order in the face of its categorical direction protecting students who participated in the demonstrations.
“There’s no question of taking action against any youth in view of our categorical and clear order. The police had sought permission to register a single FIR to ascertain their individual roles, if any, in incidents involving bodily harm or destruction of public property. The court also directed that its displeasure with the DM and the police be recorded in their service records. The high court also issued a wider warning to the bureaucracy, saying IAS and IPS officers owed their loyalty to the Constitution and not to the political executive.
Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said that the court would seek an explanation from the Gautam Budh Nagar district and executive magistrates after senior advocate Bishwajit Bhattacharyya brought the September 4 notice issued to Gautam Buddha University student Akshat Tripathi to the bench’s attention. The CJI agreed with Bhattacharyya that the issuance of the notice, even though it was withdrawn the following day, was prima facie in breach of the Supreme Court’s September 1 order. The court, however, had left open for separate consideration the case of 2,837 people whom Delhi Police claimed had criminal antecedents and were prima facie present at the protest site. Bhattacharyya told the court that despite the September 1 order, Tripathi, a second-year student of Gautam Buddha University, had been issued a notice by an executive magistrate on the basis of a police report. In a judgment quashing Chaudhary’s preventive detention under the National Security Act, a bench of justices Atul Sreedharan and Achal Sachdeva had directed that ₹ 5 lakh be recovered from the salary of Gautam Budh Nagar District Magistrate Medha Roopam as compensation to Chaudhary.
Nobody dare violate our orders,” said the CJI. He described the episode as an “experiment with students of India” and urged the court to intervene to prevent such incidents from recurring. The high court had reproached the administration of “bureaucratic overreach” and found that a notice issued to Chaudhary under Section 130 of the BNSS, ostensibly before her arrest, had in fact been prepared after she was taken into custody. It said the procedure was “ex post facto the arrest and nothing more than a sham”. Officers who forgot this, it said, risked reducing Uttar Pradesh to “an Orwellian Dystopia”.
