Hearing a plea to intervene against attacks on Christian establishments across the country, the Supreme Court on Friday asked the Centre to find out whether States are following its 2018 judgment which puts the onus on the police to prevent communal violence and lynchings.
The query from a Bench led by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud came in response to a petition filed by Archbishop of Bangalore Diocese Dr. Peter Machado, represented by senior advocate Colin Gonsalves, who submitted that there were around 505 attacks on the religious community in the past several months alone.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, for the Centre, sought time to file a preliminary affidavit. The court gave the government till Monday.
Tehseen Poonawala judgment
"We had laid a framework to deal with such cases in the Tehseen Poonawala judgment. We want to know whether our directions in the judgment are being followed by States… That will be our key area of focus," Justice Chandrachud addressed Mr. Mehta.
Mr. Gonsalves said the Poonawala judgment was in the context of lynchings. "What we want is a similar decision. It can be done by tweaking that judgment," he suggested.
The July 2018 judgment had laid down several preventive, remedial and punitive measures to combat the crime of lynching.
It had condemned the increase in number of incidents of mob lynchings across the country as “horrendous acts of mobocracy”. The court had even asked the Parliament to make lynching a separate offence.
The 45-page judgment had wondered whether the "populace of a great Republic like ours has lost the values of tolerance to sustain a diverse culture?"
The court had observed that the recent litany of spiralling mob violence, their horror, the grim and gruesome scenes of lynchings were made worse by the apathy of the bystanders, numbness of mute spectators, inertia of the police and, finally, the “grandstanding of the incident by the perpetrators of the crimes” on social media.
“Creeping threats”
Describing lynchings and mob violence as “creeping threats”, the judgment had warned that the rising wave of frenzied mobs — fed by fake news, self-professed morality and false stories — would consume the country like a “typhoon-like monster”.
The court had held the primary obligation of the government was to protect all individuals irrespective of race, caste, class or religion.
“Crime knows no religion and neither the perpetrator nor the victim can be viewed through the lens of race, caste, class or religion,” the judgment had observed.
