Delhi court convicts 2 AAP MLAs for being part of mob that attacked cops in 2015

As per the prosecution’s case, on February 20, 2015, the MLAs were part of a mob which assaulted several policemen of Burari police station over allegations that they did not take action in a kidnapping case. Police alleged the members of the mob demanded that the accused persons in the case be handed over to them so they may take action. After their request was denied, the mob assaulted policemen on duty.

Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (ACMM) Vaibhav Mehta convicted Model Town MLA Tripathi, Burari MLA Jha and other accused person after concluding that they sloganeered and instigated a mob that had attacked personnel on September 7. The judgment was made available recently.

The court perused the testimonies of prosecution witnesses and said their testimony was consistent to show that the two AAP MLAs were “not only active participants but were in fact leading the crowd and… provoking them”. It said that they “shared the common object of unlawful assembly which was to teach police officials a lesson and to overawe the police by force/show of force”.

The defence counsel had argued that the accused persons were mere bystanders or were peacefully protesting. The MLAs’ lawyers argued that they were not provoking the crowd but had gone to defuse the situation.

The two AAP leaders had produced 14 defence witnesses to show that they left the police station before the violence. However, the court said there were “some discrepancies in the testimonies of the defence witnesses” when compared to the statement Jha gave in court. Most contradictions were in the different set of timings given by Jha and the witnesses as to when he entered the station and in having an argument with the policemen.

After perusing testimonies of the prosecution witnesses and police station daily diary entries, the court said the “prosecution has been able to establish that both accused persons, Jha and Tripathi, were present at the spot when the crowd turned violent and in fact had played a major role in provoking and instigating the crowd”.

The court convicted the MLAs and others namely, Balram Jha, Shyam Gopal Gupta, Kishore Kumar, Lalit Mishra, Jagdish Chandra Joshi, Narender Singh Rawat, Neeraj Pathak, Raju Malik, Ashok Kumar, Ravi Prakash Jha, Ismail Islam, Manoj Kumar, Vijay Pratap Singh, Heera Devi and Yashwant. Ten other accused persons were acquitted.

They were found guilty of offences under IPC sections 147 (rioting), 186 (obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions), 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty) and 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence commit­ted in prosecution of common object) but acquitted of criminal intimidation and damaging property charges.

The court will hear the case on quantum of sentence on September 21.