The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked attorney-general R. Venkataramani to consider a PIL petition seeking guidelines to prevent the recurrence of racial attacks against people from the Northeast in the wake of the murder of Tripura student Anjel Chakma in Uttarakhand last year.
Chakma, a 24-year-old MBA student, died on December 26 after suffering grievous injuries in a racially motivated attack in Dehradun. The petitioner said no one came forward to save Chakma. The Uttarakhand government had denied any racial attack in the face of widespread condemnation.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M. Pancholi said it agreed “that such incidents should be dealt with an iron hand”.
However, it asked the PIL petitioner and advocate Anoop Prakash Awasthi to furnish a copy of his petition to the attorney-general to be taken up with the competent authorities for evolving guidelines on such attacks.
The bench said it could not direct the government to formulate any legislation or guidelines on the issue as it fell within the legislature’s domain.
The bench, however, recorded in its order that the plea filed in public interest raised some vital questions relating to the formulation of penal laws to prevent
group-based violence on the grounds of race, place of birth and language.
Awasthi said Chakma’s death was raised on the floor of Parliament, but lawmakers declined to make provisions for an agency to deal with such hate crimes.
The plea sought guidelines along the lines of the directions issued by the apex court in the Vishaka vs State of Rajasthan and Others (1997) case. In the 1997 Vishaka case, the top court had directed all public and private authorities to mandatorily constitute special cells in their respective offices to prevent sexual harassment of women at workplaces.
“We are of the view that the aforesaid issues should be brought before the competent authority by the good office of the attorney-general for India. Plea disposed of with liberty to petitioner to hand over soft copy of petition to the office of AG and also along with copy of this order to enable the learned AG to take up the matter before the appropriate authority,” the bench said.
However, the official copy of the order was not uploaded till the time of filing the report.