Guwahati, May 6: Gauhati High Court has issued 25 instructions to police stations in Assam on how to run their day-to-day activities after it detected “serious flaws” in their functioning methods.
The instructions, which include ways to maintain case diaries, general diaries, court judgment registers and file FIRs in police stations and comply with the norms set by Assam police manual for arrest and detention of a person, came during the judgment on a case of Paltan Bazar police station (68/2007) in Guwahati on Friday.
In the case, the court found that the police did not maintain general diary and case diary of the accused, Umesh Chandra Tiwari, and why he was detained and harassed by police officials, despite the high court granting him anticipatory bail.
Tiwari was charged with obstructing a lady magistrate from carrying out a cleaning drive at Paltan Bazar in February 2007 and misbehaving with the informant and her team.
After a case was registered under Section 353 IPC, Tiwari obtained anticipatory bail from the high court on February 9, 2007, on the condition that he would make himself available for questioning by the police before the next hearing of the case on February 13.
But when Tiwari had gone to the police station on being called by investigation officer Kurkendra Mandal around 6pm on February 12, he was detained for over 22 hours, even after he had produced the copy of the anticipatory bail.
During the hearing of the case, Mandal told the court that he had detained the accused on instruction from the officer-in-charge (OC) of the police station, Kandarpa Chamua.
The officer-in-charge, when summoned by the court, said he had asked the investigation officer not to release Tiwari following instruction from his seniors.
During hearing of the case on February 22, Tiwari had alleged before the court that a deputy superintendent of police (city), Fakhrul Islam, had told his bailer (Tiwari’s brother) that bail would not be accepted. Islam, however, told the court in his affidavit on February 28, 2007, that he had no knowledge of the incident and had visited the police station to take stock of security measures for the 2007 National Games in Guwahati.
When the high court asked the deputy superintendent of police to provide the general diary of the police station, he produced only a rough copy of it, saying it was pending since February 9, 2007.
“From the chronology of facts, it becomes apparent that if not the other police stations, Paltan Bazar police station has, at least, the unique system of maintaining rough general diary. In the present case, there is no record as to what had happened between February 8 and 13,” Justice I.A. Ansari of the high court observed in his 34-page judgment.
“Thus, the loose sheets of the general diary point towards a very dangerous possibility; and the possibility is that any offender or criminal can be shown to be innocent by simply changing the statement of the offender at a later stage and, on the contrary, an innocent person can be made an offender in the same way,” the court observed.
The court issued 25 instructions on how to maintain case diaries, general diaries and FIRs. It asked the superintendents of police to ensure that the case diaries be bound and contain a specific number of pages.
The officer-in-charge should keep the case diary and investigating officers should be handed over blank case diaries only when they are entrusted with any case for probe.
The court also directed that every police station should maintain a separate court order register, containing particulars such as nature of the court’s order, date and time of its receipt, name of the court issuing the order, date of order and the remarks regarding implementation of the order.
“The state home secretary and the director-general of police shall issue instructions to all the SPs and OCs of every police station and in-charges of every police outpost to ensure that provisions of Section 41A to 41D CrPC are strictly followed,” the order said.
