Meet the Pune man whose FIR set in motion the mayhem that singed India yesterday

PUNE: Bhaskar Gaikwad, the man whose FIR led to a litigation that eventually resulted in the Supreme Court’s directives on the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, said on Monday that he would file a review petition against the “dilution” of the enactment.

“Certain facts in the FIR which formed the basis for the litigation were not brought to the notice of the apex court,” he told TOI. “The case took a different turn because a wrong translation of the original FIR was placed before the SC by the opponents,” he claimed.

Gaikwad, who is an employee of the College of Engineering in Pune, said, “The original FIR was in Marathi. When it was to be submitted to the Supreme Court, they submitted a version of the FIR which did not have the original three paragraphs which explained why the FIR was filed in the first place. Additionally, they added a line in the translated version which was misleading and led to the exoneration of the then state director of technical education (DTE), who had moved the Supreme Court.”

Gaikwad said he would file a review petition by next week based on the fact that a fraud has been committed by way of submission of wrong document in the court.

The case can be traced to 2009 when Gaikwad was posted at the Government College of Pharmacy in Karad. “The then principal had committed some fraud and wanted me to rewrite my records. I, being the store manager, refused to do so and even complained to the higher authorities that I was being pressured to do a wrong thing. This enraged the officials in the college and they wrote a bad review in my annual confidential report,” Gaikwad claimed.

He got a show-cause notice from the DTE’s regional office in Pune to which he replied satisfactorily owing to which the ACR about him was deleted for want of evidence.

“I filed an FIR against the two officials in the college. The DySP conducted an enquiry and sought permission from the DTE to prosecute these officials. But the DTE rejected the sanction and police filed a closure report in 2011. I never got any notice. Finally, I came to know about it in 2016,” Gaikwad said. He then filed a second complaint in 2016 against the two officials and the DTE.

The case went to the judicial magistrate first class in Karad after which the persons named in the FIR moved the Bombay high court. The HC rejected the plea to quash the FIR. Following this, the DTE moved the petition in the Supreme Court which eventually led to the judgment that has the entire Dalit population up in arms against the alleged “dilution” of the SC/ST Act (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.