‘OUR HEAD OF STATE IS INTOLERANT... DOESN’T OBEY THE RULE OF LAW’

Calcutta police had been staunchly defending for three years a dubious course of action that crumbled under legal scrutiny when the gavel finally came down on the Ambikesh Mahapatra case on Tuesday.

Calcutta High Court's verdict upholding the West Bengal Human Rights Commission's recommendations to the Bengal government in the case exposes, if not indicts, the police for the wrongful arrest of Jadavpur University professor Mahapatra and his neighbour Subrata Sengupta shortly after midnight on April 13, 2012.

The police had purportedly rescued the duo from a mob that had attacked their New Garia housing estate that night before putting them in a lock-up. Their crime? Circulating an Internet meme lampooning the chief minister. Those who had attacked Mahapatra and Sengupta were never hauled up.

The duo had been first charged under sections 500 (defamation against president/vice president, administrator or minister), 509 (uttering any word or making any gesture intended to insult the modesty of a woman), 114 (abetment of any offence when abettor is present) of the IPC and under Section 66A of the IT Act (sending offensive material using electronic communication device).

All the charges are bailable, which means Mahapatra and Sengupta could have been allowed to go home from the police station itself. But the duo had to wait until the next day to be granted bail in court.

The police later dropped all the charges mentioned under sections of the IPC. After submitting a chargesheet under Section 66A of the IT Act, the government filed a case in a lower court that is still pending.

One of the recommendations of the human rights commission, which conducted a suo motu probe even as the case against Mahapatra and Sengupta was being built, is that departmental proceedings be initiated against the two officers of East Jadavpur police station who had started the case and made the arrests.

On Tuesday, the high court upheld departmental action against inspector Milan Kumar Das, additional officer-in-charge of East Jadavpur police station, and sub-inspector Sanjay Biswas, then attached to the police station.

Biswas was the officer who had gone to the housing estate, "rescued" the professor and his neighbour from a mob of Trinamul supporters and brought them to the police station.

Das being the senior-most officer at the police station had ordered the duo's arrest.

The complaint against Mahapatra had been lodged by a person named Amit Sardar, who was neither a resident of the housing society where the professor lives nor had received the email containing the meme lampooning the chief minister, sources said.

Sardar, the police said, is a resident of Nayabad.

Departmental proceedings against the two officers apparently isn't guaranteed despite the high court's order.

A senior officer at the police headquarters in Lalbazar said: "The government can either challenge the order or comply with it. If the government decides to comply with it and gives us the go-ahead, only then will we initiate departmental proceedings against the two."

Senior officials of the home department said on Tuesday evening that they were yet to receive a copy of the court's order.

"We will have to go through the clauses mentioned in the human rights act that deal with the options regarding recommendations of the rights commission. The picture will be clearer once we get the court order," an officer said.

A retired IPS officer said the police clearly didn't pursue the right course of action in the case. "It is apparent that the police did exactly the opposite of what they were expected to do that night. When the two men were rescued from a situation and taken to the police station for safe custody, it was the responsibility of the law-enforcing agency to first protect them. Even when a complaint was lodged against them, the arrest wasn't mandatory."

What the police did that night in April 2012 also suggests the involvement of officers much senior to Das and Biswas.

Sources in the home department told Metro that though the two officers of East Jadavpur police station are under the scanner, the instruction to start a case and arrest the professor and his neighbour came from an IPS officer then with Calcutta police.

The entire police machinery had allegedly swung into action to book the men who dared to lampoon the chief minister, sources said.

"Since the matter dealt with the lampooning of chief minister Mamata Banerjee, nobody wasted time checking the merit of the complaint against Mahapatra. If rescuing him and Sengupta was a spontaneous act to ensure their safety, the decision to arrest them instead of starting a case against their attackers was apparently taken by an IPS officer known for his proximity to the chief minister," said an official of the home department.

The IPS officer is currently an additional director-general of police.

Senior police officers, both retired and working, said making the arrests, booking the duo under a little known section of the Information Technology Act and letting the mob go would not have been possible without the knowledge of the top brass in the police headquarters.