The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Statue damage : court quashes detention order

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Friday, Jun 15, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Statue damage : court quashes detention order

Staff Reporter

The accused had not filed bail petitions at all: Bench

MADURAI: The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court on Thursday quashed the preventive detention order, passed under the National Security Act, against five persons accused of damaging the statue of self-respect movement leader E.V. Ramaswamy, popularly known as Periyar, at Srirangam in Tiruchi district.

The statue, installed opposite the tower of the temple , was damaged on December 7 last year.

A Division Bench of Justice D. Murugesan and Justice T. Sudanthiram allowed the habeas corpus petitions filed by them on the ground that the City Police Commissioner had passed the order fearing that there was an imminent possibil ity of the accused coming out on bail in the criminal case, though the petitioners had not filed any bail application at all.

The detainees were S. Arjun Sampath, president of the Hindu Makkal Katchi; R. Manickam, Coimbatore district Vice-president of the party; K. Senthil Kumar, Coimbatore district general secretary; K. Rajasekar, Coimbatore district Youth Wing secretary; and B. Sujith, Madukkarai union secretary. They were detained under the NSA on December 29, while being on remand, having been charged under the provisions of the Indian Penal Code.

Writing the judgment for the Bench, Mr. Justice Murugesan said: “The satisfaction [of the detaining authority] as to the ‘real possibility’ or ‘imminent possibility’ of a detainee coming out on bail is not a mere procedure, but such satisfaction should be supported by materials [such as a bail application]. In the absence of a bail application, in our considered view, the detaining authority could not have come to a subjective satisfaction that there is a real possibility of the accused coming out on bail.”

Besides, the Police Commissioner had stated that there was a real possibility of the accused coming out on bail as the courts granted bail in such cases after “a lapse of time.” “In our opinion, the words ‘real possibility’ or ‘imminent possibility’ cannot go together with the words ‘after a lapse of time,’ because they are contradictory,” the judges said.

When it was brought to the notice of the judges that a similar petition filed by a co-accused R. Raghavan was dismissed by another Division Bench on February 22, they said it could not be a reason for dismissing the present petitions too. The grounds raised now were not canvassed at that time, they said.

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