THE ALLAHABAD High Court on Friday asked the UP government to submit case diaries and original records of the investigation into the 2007 Gorakhpur hate speech case, in which Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has been named as an accused. A division bench comprising Justice Krishna Murari and Justice Akhilesh Chandra Sharma also sought submission of the government’s May 3 order refusing to grant sanction to prosecute the accused, including prime accused Adityanath. While hearing final arguments in the hate speech case on Friday, the bench directed state advocate general Raghvendra Singh to submit — on September 11, the next date of hearing — all case diaries and original police and government records of the incident, which led to communal riots in Gorakhpur in 2007. This, despite Singh stating that all records have been submitted to the court. Farman Naqvi, the counsel for the petitioners, told the court the case has not been probed fairly and impartially since 2007 and the prime accused are yet to be questioned by the police. While challenging the “imminent bias” arising in the legal process by virtue of the changed circumstances of the prime accused becoming the CM of the state overseeing the investigation of the case, Naqvi stated that the dates cited by the UP government, when it claimed to have refused to grant sanction to prosecute its own CM, was inconsistent. In cases of inciting communal riots, the government is supposed to grant or refuse sanction to prosecute a riot accused. In this case, the head of the state, the CM, had the power to grant or refuse sanction to prosecute himself, something the petitioners have been challenging since May. The court was hearing a petition filed by Parvez Parwaz and Asad Hayat. While Parwaz was a Gorakhpur resident, who had filed an FIR in connection with the riots, Hayat was a witness in the case. Other than Adityanath, a five-time MP from Gorakhpur, those named in the FIR included then city mayor Anju Chaudhary and local MLA Radha Mohan Das Agrawal. Last month, the bench had allowed the petitioners to challenge the government’s refusal to grant sanction to prosecute the CM by observing that nobody “cannot be left remedy-less”.
