Ballabhgarh violence: SC refuses to hear PIL

Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, June 4

The Supreme Court today refused to entertain a PIL for a CBI or an SIT probe into the May 25 communal violence at Atali village in Faridabad district over the construction of a mosque.

A Vacation Bench comprising Justices Prafulla C Pant and Amitava Roy asked the petitioner, Shakir Ali, to go to the Punjab and Haryana High Court with his plea instead of coming straight to the SC.

Ali’s advocate pleaded for SC’s intervention to safeguard the human rights of about 1,000 persons belonging to the minority who had fled the village following the attack on them and their property by an armed gang of about 2,000 persons.

The state police had failed to arrest any accused despite naming nine of them in the FIRs and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s public statements that his government was committed to protecting people’s religious freedom, said Ali, claiming to be a victim of the violence.

The minority community had been targeted, irrespective of the judicial verdict holding that the suit property on which the mosque was being constructed belonged to the Wakf Board, not to the village panchayat, he said.

An impartial probe was necessary for the return of the minority community to the village, the PIL pleaded.