The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to grant an urgent hearing of a contempt plea against states that have not complied with the top court’s 2018 judgement laying down guidelines to prevent mob lynching, The Indian Express reported.
A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Deepak Gupta said the plea will come up for hearing in the regular course. A lawyer for one of the petitioners in the case appeared before a bench seeking an early hearing on the ground that incidents of mob lynching have increased despite the Supreme Court’s verdict.
On July 17, 2018, the Supreme Court had decried cases of lynching and cow vigilantism and said that mobocracy cannot be allowed in society. “No citizen can take law into his hands nor become law unto himself,” the bench had said. It had also proposed a set of preventive, remedial and punitive measures to curb instances of lynching.
The court had ordered the appointment of nodal police officers in all districts, efficient patrolling in areas where there was possibility of such incidents, and completion of trial in these cases within six months.
In a recent instance of a mob attack, Muslim man Tabrez Ansari died in Jharkhand a few days after a group of people tied him to a pole and beat him him for allegedly attempting to steal a motorcycle. The FIR said that the mob had also forced Ansari to chant “Jai Shri Ram” and “Jai Hanuman”.
‘Mob lynching incidents are inhuman, barbaric’
The Kerala Assembly on Thursday condemned mob lynching incidents across the country and termed it “inhuman and barbaric”, PTI reported.
“The Assembly unanimously condemns the mob lynching incidents, which are inhuman and barbaric and needs to be stopped immediately,” Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said in a resolution that he moved in the Assembly. “If such incidents are allowed to continue wherein innocent people are branded as those who have done some wrong and killed, then the rule of law will collapse completely.”
The resolution said there had been a four-fold increase in mob lynching incidents in the country after 2014 and most of them were carried out by those claiming to be cow vigilantes. The resolution also condemned the lynching of Tabrez Ansari.
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