New Delhi: Calling peaceful agitation a “fundamental right” in a democracy, a magistrate’s court in Mumbai has acquitted five women accused of unlawful assembly in 2015, Bar and Bench has reported.
The women were agitating on the Eastern Freeway of the city for regular water in their neighbourhood, which had seen no water supply in the days preceding their protest. They were detained for holding up traffic. Two of them were senior citizens.
The magistrate R.S. Pajankar said there was no reason for police to take action against them.
“In democratic country peaceful agitation is a fundamental right. The women were agitating as there was no water supply in their area for some days. They were sent home by the police after an understanding. Therefore, there was no reason for the police to register FIR against them and subsequently arrest them,” the magistrate said, according to Bar and Bench.
The magistrate also said that the evidence provided by the investigating officer was refuted by two independent witnesses, there was a delay in filing the FIR, no cause for this was mentioned and that police had made no relevant diary entry before setting out for the cite of the agitation.
The court also asked why just one woman was arrested.
“It is strange that at the time of incident there were 35 to 40 women present on the spot of incident, however the police arrested only one accused on that day and did not arrest other women,” the magistrate said.
Also read: Physically Confining Protests to Out-of-the-Way Locations Inflames the Aggrieved Group
The court ultimately concluded that the women were peacefully and legitimately protesting and therefore there was no merit in the FIR against them.
Citizens’ right to protest, upheld by the Kurla court, has recently been the subject of legal debate following controversial points made by the Supreme Court on it concerning two significant public protests – the one against the Citizenship Amendment Act at Shaheen Bagh and the other against the now repealed farm acts at Delhi’s borders.
At a hearing against the former in 2021 – much after the protests had winded up due to COVID-19 – the apex court had held that protests must take place in “designated areas”.
“Democracy and dissent go hand in hand, but then the demonstrations expressing dissent have to be in designated places alone. The present case was not even one of protests taking place in an undesignated area, but was a blockage of a public way which caused grave inconvenience to commuters. We cannot accept the plea of the applicants that an indeterminable number of people can assemble whenever they choose to protest,” a bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Aniruddha Bose and Krishna Murari said.
In the same year, the Supreme Court came down harshly on farmers who were protesting at the borders of Delhi, saying, “You have strangulated the entire city and now you want to come within the city and start protest again here”.