Family members of the farmers killed in Lakhimpur Kheri violence have moved the Supreme Court seeking cancellation of bail of accused Ashish Mishra, the son of Union minister Ajay Mishra, who was arrested in connection with the incident.
On February 10, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court had granted bail to Ashish, who had been in custody for the past four months.
On October 3, last year, eight people, including four farmers, were killed in Lakhimpur Kheri after a farmers’ protest turned violent. Four farmers were allegedly run over by an SUV while a driver and two BJP workers were allegedly lynched by angry farmers. A journalist also died in the violence.
Last week, advocates CS Panda and Shiv Kumar Tripathi had filed a plea in the top court challenging the bail granted to Ashish.
In the plea, the two lawyers, who moved the apex court last year seeking an independent probe into the matte, had argued, “How could the High Court Justice rest his reasoning on presumption and guess work using the word ‘might’ to arrive at a conclusion that the said crime culminated in a possibility of the driver trying to speed up the vehicle to save himself. The said conclusion by the learned High Court justice is unsustainable in law.”
The advocates also said that reasoning of the high court suffers from the vices of non-application of judicial mind, and it took recourse to assumptions without the support of direct evidence.
“The net effect of the getting a bail to the accused Ashish Misra @ Monu and non-interrogation of the Union Minister of State (Home) Ajay Misra by the retd. Justice Rakesh Jain… results in greater prejudice affecting the morale of the law-abiding peaceful protestors hailing from Lakhimpur local area and other parts of UP,” it added.
On November 17, last year, the top court had appointed Justice Rakesh Kumar Jain, former judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, to monitor the probe by Uttar Pradesh SIT.
The SC also reconstituted the SIT and inducted get three IPS officers who are not natives of the state – SB Shiradkar, Padmaja Chauhan and Preetinder Singh.
Shiradkar, a 1993-batch IPS officer from Maharashtra and presently serving as ADG Intelligence in Uttar Pradesh, will head the SIT, the apex court had said in its order.
