The Andhra Pradesh High Court on Thursday took a serious view of the issue of notice to former Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu under Section 151 of the Criminal Procedure Code (Cr.P.C.) during his recent visit to Visakhapatnam, and questioned why action should not be taken against the police officers who served the notice.
The court adjourned the hearing and the order is awaited.
Sec.151(1) empowers a police officer knowing of a design to commit any cognizable offence to arrest, without orders from a magistrate and without a warrant, person so designing if it appears to him / her that the commission of the offence cannot be otherwise prevented.
In his deposition before Chief Justice J.K. Maheswari and Justices A.V. Sesha Sai and M. Satyanarayana Murthy, Director-General of Police (DGP) Gautam Sawang said he could not take departmental action when the case was pending in the court, which said the pendency of court proceedings was no bar for the DGP to take action in the matter.
The DGP said the notice did not indicate the compliance of parameters in Section 151 of the Cr.P.C. and assured the court that all the principles of law would be upheld.
According to Advocate-General S. Sriram, the DGP told the court that the preconditions for the exercise of power was not expressly indicated in the notice but circumstances existed.
It may be noted that the police detained Mr. Naidu at Visakhapatnam airport on February 27 when a large number of YSR Congress Party activists stopped him from touring the district as part of his ‘Praja Chaitanya Yatra’, alleging that he came to the city to obstruct the proposed shifting of the Executive capital from Amaravati.
Former MLA T. Shravan Kumar had filed a lunch-motion petition in the HC alleging that the detention was to thwart Mr. Naidu’s programme.
