Gurugram: A mob. A torched government office. Petrol bombs. Gandasis or agricultural chopping blades. And slogans in support of a jailed godman and against the government.
On paper, it read like an open-and-shut case of arson and sedition.
But nine years after a mob torched a state utility office in Kaithal, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has torn apart the prosecution’s case and laid down a principle that goes beyond this case: chanting slogans against the government is dissent, not disaffection.
On 2 July, a division bench of Justices Vinod S. Bhardwaj and Sukhvinder Kaur dismissed the Haryana government’s appeal against the 2019 acquittal of Dharampal, Jasbir and Shiv Kumar, all accused of setting fire to a Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam (UHBVN) office in Kalayat on 25 August 2017, hours after Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh was convicted of rape.
A copy of the order has been made available on the website of the Punjab and Haryana High Court now.
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The case that would not stand up
According to the FIR, Sandeep Bharat, a sub-divisional officer at the power utility, was working in his office with six colleagues when 14 to 15 men descended on the premises armed with lathis, dandas, gandasis and bottles of petrol, chanting slogans in support of the Dera chief and also against the government.
The office was ransacked and set ablaze. Four men were eventually arrested and charged under sedition, arson and criminal conspiracy provisions, besides the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act.
But when the case went to trial, the story unravelled quickly.
No prosecution witness named any of the accused in the original complaint. No Test Identification Parade was ever held, even though the witnesses claimed to be strangers to the men they later identified in court.
The Forensic Science Laboratory at Madhuban found no trace of petrol, kerosene or diesel on the burnt articles, despite the prosecution’s own case resting on the claim that petrol bombs started the fire.
A police witness who said he chased the mob for a kilometre and stayed on the phone with his seniors throughout, never once photographed or filmed the men, despite carrying a mobile phone. He then gave two contradictory versions of who was carrying what weapon.
The trial court acquitted all four. The state appealed. The high court has now shut that door firmly.
‘Frustration is not disaffection’
The most significant part of the judgment is not the litany of investigative lapses, but the bench’s articulation of what constitutes sedition, and what does not.
The court held that a violent protest may amount to rioting, but that alone does not make it an act of inciting “hatred or contempt” against the government.
Sloganeering against the government or its institutions, the bench said, is not by itself enough to slap sedition charges on citizens in an elected democracy.
Frustration, dissatisfaction or even outrage are not the same as disaffection or hatred.
And because a sedition charge carries a heavy punishment, the court said its ingredients must be established strictly and not presumed from the noise of a protest.
Applying that standard, the bench found the evidence before it amounted to nothing more than sloganeering against the government, a form of expressing dissent, and not proof of hatred, contempt or disaffection.
A pattern, not a slip
The court was equally unimpressed by the state’s charge under Section 188 of the IPC, for disobeying a public order. The prohibitory order the prosecution relied on was passed under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), nearly 10 months after the incident, rendering it legally irrelevant.
The bench summed up the case in one line: the prosecution had only managed to show that the accused “may have been” involved, when the law demands proof that they “must be involved”. Suspicion and supposition, the judges said, are probabilities, not proof.
With that, the high court affirmed the acquittal in full, closing the book on a nine-year-old case that began with fire and ended with a judgement clarifying the difference between a protest and a crime against the state.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)