A petition was filed on Monday by activist Tehseen Poonawalla in the Supreme Court seeking contempt proceedings against the Union government and the Delhi police in connection with the violence that occurred on the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus on Sunday.
Mr. Poonawalla said the police had not implemented the court’s July 17, 2018 direction to frame and implement “preventive and remedial guidelines for the government and police authorities to curb and handle mob violence”.
The petition said the guidelines were meant to prevent anyone from taking the law into his own hands. It said the law enforcement authorities had failed to act against the “masked miscreants” who entered the campus, and no First Information Report (FIR) had so far been registered.
“It shall be the duty of every police officer to cause a mob to disperse, by exercising his power under Section 129 of the Cr. PC, which, in his opinion, has a tendency to cause violence or wreak the havoc of lynching in the disguise of vigilantism or otherwise... However, when a large number of masked miscreants entered the campus of the JNU, armed with sticks, hammers and other weapons, who clearly had a malicious intention, they were neither stopped nor deterred by the Delhi police personnel deployed on the campus,” the petition said.
