The lawyers also argued that there can be no presumption of guilt only because the person at the receiving end was from an upper caste.
A central government amendment passed by both Houses of Parliament in the just-concluded monsoon session, reinstating a controversial clause allowing immediate arrests in complaints filed under the SC/ST Act, was challenged in the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Lawyers Prathvi Raj Chauhan and Priya Sharma filed the PIL challenging the amendment Act brought in by government following the uproar over the top court creating a mechanism that would filter serious complaints from frivolous and motivated ones, before arrests were made.
The amendment has been brought in with an eye on the 2019 polls, they alleged. They also argued that there can be no presumption of guilt only because the person at the receiving end was from an upper caste.
Besides, the duo claimed that the number of cases being filed under the Act had shot up alarmingly in recent years to back their claim that the law was being misused. Dalit activists had taken to the streets to protest the March 20, 2018, ruling which had directed that no one be arrested immediately in case of complaints filed under the Act.
A bench, led by retired Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel, had ruled that such complaints be first filtered by a competent authority in case of babus and senior police officials in case of others. This had not gone down well with political parties and groups espousing the Dalit cause. They had argued that conviction rates were low as it is under the law and this would completely knock the teeth of the law in the face of caste discrimination still rampant in India.
They highlighted the recent instances of harassment faced by Dalits in some parts of the country. The top court had ruled in a particular case that the stringent law, which has no provision for anticipatory bail, had been misused to harass government officials and quashed the proceedings.
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It said that it cannot be blind to misuse of the law to deny a person his right to life and liberty and had created a mechanism to filter genuine complaints from motivated ones. The bench had observed that 85% of the cases filed under the law ended in acquittal. The exercise of vetting a complaint would delay arrests only by a week in genuine cases, it had said. But Justices Goel and Uday Lalit’s ruling was opposed by political parties espousing the Dalit cause. Led by Lok Jan Shakti’s Ram Vilas Paswan, they had called on the government to undo its decision to appoint Justice Goel as chairperson of the SC/ST Commission.
