New Delhi: Preventive/prohibitory orders are losing their teeth due to frequent violations with “little or no consequences”, a court has pointed out, citing the recent protests and drawing parallels with the 2020 northeast Delhi riots.
And once that respect is lost, restoring it becomes far more difficult,” additional sessions judge Parveen Kumar Singh observed Friday, awarding six months’ rigorous imprisonment to seven men convicted earlier of violating 144 CrPC. “The recent events in Delhi have again brought this problem to the forefront. They force us to ask a simple question: what is the point of issuing a prohibitory order if it can be openly violated without any real consequences? If the law is not enforced, people will eventually stop respecting it.
In its sentencing order, the court noted, “Sadly, disobeying prohibitory orders under Section 144 CrPC has become so common that the public has come to believe that it is a mere executive formality — orders that can be openly flouted, mocked and ignored. “More often than not, the violation of this executive preventive command results in violence as had happened in the northeast Delhi in Feb 2020, or during the recent protests in Delhi. The court, however, found that they had violated the prohibitory order under CrPC 144 declared in the area.
The judge added that “the time has come that a deterrent is put in place to send a message across that in case of violation of the prohibitory orders, no leniency shall be shown and the maximum punishment provided under law shall be inflicted”. He also stressed that in any “rule-based society, violation of law should be an aberration”. Judge Singh, who is handling a designated court for cases stemming from northeast Delhi riots, underlined that the issue is “not a few individual infraction. Every time such lawful order was openly defied with impunity, it weakened public faith in the administration’s ability to enforce its own orders”. He added that slowly, people began to believe that such an order was only issued for it to be broken in the name of the right protest. They were acquitted of charges of murder, rioting while armed with a deadly weapon and promoting enmity between groups. Another accused, Sachin Gupta alias Mopi, was acquitted of all charges. The court also touched upon socio-economic status reports, which identified the convicts as first-time offenders. Harjeet was a Rapido rider While Bhushan worked for Porter. Since each had already spent more than six months in detention during the trial, they were not taken back into custody after paying the fines.