Attacks on Christians: SC asks MHA to get reports from 8 states

A bench of Justices D Y Chandrachud and Hima Kohli said the MHA should get verification reports from Bihar, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh on steps taken regarding alleged incidents of violence.

It also asked the petitioners to provide a break-up of the instances to the office of Solicitor General Tushar Mehta.

Chief Secretaries of these states should ensure that information on registration of FIR, status of investigation, arrests made, and chargesheet is given, the court said. It said the verification exercise should be carried out within two months and an affidavit filed before it.

In an affidavit filed in the matter earlier, the Centre had raised preliminary objections to its maintenance. It stated that the plea by Archbishop Of Bangalore Diocese, Dr Peter Machado, along with the National Solidarity Forum, is “based upon mere conjectures” and there appears to be “some hidden agenda in filing such deceptive petitions, creating unrest throughout the country”.

The Centre said the plea may even have been filed “for getting assistance from outside the country to meddle with internal affairs of our nation”.

On Thursday, S-G Mehta, appearing for the Centre, said the government has already done a fact-check of the allegations. “I have said in my affidavit that most of the cases are false,” he added.

The court said it is “not beginning with the assumption that all that is quoted is true. What we will ask you to do is conduct a verification exercise as per their tabulations. Get the States to reply. You have not done that because some [allegations] you held as untrue”.

Mehta said the petitioners had not approached the government.

But the court said, “you verify…. Do not go by only that some of the incidents were held untrue.”

The bench added that it can ask the MHA to pick a few states and get information from them.

Mehta replied that the government has already done this exercise and said he is not witnessing such pleas for the first time. “It is a pattern,” he submitted.

Justice Chandrachud said: “When they point out facts that warrant our further scrutiny, we have to conduct an exercise to verify. Let there be an overall verification in some selected states and give us the report. Then we can separate the grain from the chaff and see which cases require our interference.”

The court also made it clear that it is carrying out the exercise to see if its judgment in the Tehseen Poonawala case, wherein it had issued a slew of directions regarding mob violence and lynching, has been complied with.

Appearing for the petitioners, senior advocate Colin Gonsalves said there is police connivance in almost all cases of violence. He also submitted that the reports were compiled after talking to families of alleged victims.

The court asked the counsel how he classified the incidents. Merely because a crime took place against a member of a community, it may not be a communal incident, the bench said.

Gonsalves said while that may be right, the incidents cited are connected. Prayer meetings have been disrupted and pastors beaten up. He told the court that as per data, there were around 505 instances of violence in 2021 and about 700 during 2021-22.