A Guwahati court Monday directed the police to register a case against Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on the basis of a complaint by Congress MP Abdul Khaleque last year.
On December 28, 2021, Khaleque had filed a police complaint against Sarma in the Dispur Police Station, accusing him of “hate-mongering” and making inflammatory remarks in connection to an eviction drive in Assam’s Darrang district.
When the Dispur Police Station did not register the FIR, Khaleque approached the court.
“The MP had earlier lodged FIRs at Dispur Police Station and DCP (East) Guwahati but police did not register them,” said Khaleque’s advocate Shamim Ahmed Barbhuyan, adding: “We filed a case with the Court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate on February 28. On March 5, it was referred to the court of the Sub-Divisional Judicial Magistrate in Guwahati.”
On Saturday, the court said: “The OC Dispur P.S. is directed to register a case on the allegations mentioned in the complaint and investigate the matter fairly and to submit the Final Form at the earliest.”
It added that the police had “failed in the discharge of its duty” by “failing to register the FIR”. “The veracity of the allegations is not something which can be enquired prior to the registration of the FIR. By failing to even register the FIR, it appears that the police has failed in the discharge of its duty. Hence, this Court is of the considered opinion that it is a fit case to invoke Sec 156(3) of Cr.P.C.” the order said.
In his complaint, Khaleque had referred to a part of the Chief Minister’s speech in Morigaon district on December 10, 2021, on the occasion of Swahid Divas (Martyrs’ Day), where he purportedly described the Gorukhuti eviction exercise as an “act of revenge” for the incidents of 1983, and accused Sarma of giving a “communal colour to what was supposed to be an executive exercise”.
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The Assam government’s eviction drive in September in Darrang district’s Dholpur, where primarily Bengali-speaking Muslims live, was aimed at removing “illegal encroachers” to free up government land for “landless indigenous communities” for an agricultural project at Gorukhuti. It had turned violent, leaving two people, including a 12-year-old, dead.
In his Morigaon speech, Sarma had purportedly referred to the deaths of young Assamese boys in 1983 (during the Assam agitation) in Darrang district, and said that Assam was “bound to take some degree of revenge for those deaths.”
In his complaint, Khaleque said that the eviction drive had seen “brutal killings” as well as homes being “burnt to the ground”.“By calling such horrendous acts as revenge, Sri Himanta Biswa Sarma has not only justified the killings and arson committed there, the legality of which is sub-judice before the Gauhati High Court, but he has gone far ahead and communalised the whole exercise – the target of which was the Muslim population living there,” Khaleque had added, seeking an FIR against Sarma under Sections 153 and 153-A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). “
Barbhuyan said that the court had directed Dispur Police to register an FIR against Sarma under sections 153, 153A of the IPC.
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The Indian Express reached out to the Officer in-charge (OC) of the Dispur PS asking if an FIR had been registered but the official did not comment.
