New Delhi: Delhi High Court has observed that labourers are among the “least paid and cared for” sections of society and lamented the failure to adequately value and respect physical labour while deciding an appeal in a two-decade-old assault case.
The case stems from an incident on the night of March 17, 2002, when Rajinder Kumar, a labourer at a shop in Lajpat Rai Market, was sleeping in its verandah.
This has become a regular and unending plight of the labourers in the country and to add salt to the injury, this class is least paid, least cared and least bothered,” the court said. Kumar objected to the nuisance allegedly caused by Pal and others, leading to an altercation in which Pal allegedly pushed him and attacked him with a rapi, a cobbler’s leather-cutting tool, according to the court. The court, however, modified Pal’s conviction from attempt to murder to voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons, holding that the prosecution had failed to establish the intention or knowledge necessary to attract the graver charge. It also reduced his sentence from five years to three years’ imprisonment. “A back-breaking hard day’s labour requires a sound peaceful sleep in the night to rejuvenate the body in order to enable it to assume and discharge next day’s assignments which invariably involve hard physical work….
A patrolling policeman intervened, and Kumar was taken to hospital while Pal was detained. A case under the attempt-to-murder provision was registered against him. A trial court later convicted Pal and sentenced him to five years in prison.