Similar decisions in UP, Karnataka and Haryana have been criticised for being arbitrary and crushing dissent.
Madhya Pradesh home minister Narottam Mishra. Credit: PTI
New Delhi: After the Bharatiya Janata Party governments in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Haryana decided to recover ‘damages’ from alleged ‘rioters’ and protestors, the Madhya Pradesh government too is walking down the same path, the Indian Express reported.
A new Bill, titled Madhya Pradesh Public and Private Property Damage Resolution and Recovery Bill, 2021, will allow the government to “recover upto twice the cost of damages caused to public and private property by an individual or a group during communal riots, protests and rallies”, the newspaper reported.
It is likely to come up for discussion during the winter session of the Madhya Pradesh assembly.
The Bill, according to the Indian Express, plans for claims tribunals across the state, which will have powers of civil courts under the Code of Civil Procedure 1908. The tribunals can impose costs on individuals or groups up to twice the cost of damages, and also levy an interest if recovery is not complete within 15 days.
“The cases in the tribunal will be resolved within three months and its order can only be challenged in the high court. Those indulging in riots and stone-pelting, causing damage to public and private property, will not be spared,” state home minister Narottam Mishra said.
As The Wire has reported, BJP-ruled states have been passing laws of this kind over the last few years, which have criticised as one more way for the government to punish those who dissent. UP had first passed an ordinance and then enacted a law to seek the damages, and Karnataka invoked a 2009 Supreme Court order that permits a high court to constitute machinery to investigate losses and award compensation in riots. The Haryana government took the UP route, and introduced the Haryana Recovery of Damages to Property during Disturbance to Public Order Bill, 2021 on March 16.
The Allahabad high court had termed UP’s recovery of damages ordinance arbitrary. Hearing a public interest litigation against the new law, the court stated that the “ordinance is arbitrary in its very nature”. The court also held that the “intention of the ordinance is only to frustrate and overrule the law laid down by” a bench of the high court which had earlier asked the state to remove hoardings erected by it displaying the personal information of those accused of violence during the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests.
This criticism from the court, however, has not stopped other BJP-ruled states from going down the same path, as the proposed Bill in Madhya Pradesh proves.
Legal luminaries believe that such laws are usually an excuse to divert attention from police excesses. Writing for The Wire, senior advocate of the Supreme Court Rajeev Dhavan had in December 2019, also stated that “the state of UP has certainly not obeyed the diktat of the constitution not to impose unreasonable restrictions on the right `to assemble peacefully without arms’ even in the interests of public order or the sovereignty and integrity of India. Having violated this most fundamental of constitutional duties, UP now wants to clamp down further on the repressed and exonerate the repressors.”
SOURCE ; THE WIRE
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