The district police failed to submit the status report in a 23-year-old sedition case against Jagtar Singh Hawara who is convicted in former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh’s assassination case and is currently lodged in Tihar jail. The police sought more time for filing the report after consulting with ‘senior officers.’ The court has fixed September 21 as the next date of hearing. Hawara, along with six other persons were booked under sections 124-A (sedition), 153-A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion), 225 (Resistance or obstruction to lawful apprehension of another person) and 511(Punishment for attempting to commit offenses punishable with imprisonment for life or other imprisonments) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in FIR number 31, registered on June 13, 1998 at Sohana police station. Hawara’s counsel Jaspal Singh Manjhpur told The Indian Express that he had filed applications in the court to either discharge Hawara in the case or bring him on a production warrant but the police had been delaying the process for long. He added that he filed the last application on February 27, 2019. In the application, the defense counsel had said that Hawara’s production warrants were issued on April 4, 1999 for April 28 of the same year by the court of Judicial Magistrate First Class (JMIC), Mandeep Singh Dhillon from the Kharar court but after that neither Hawara was brought on the production warrants nor was he arrested by the district police. The case came up for the hearing in the court of JMIC, Mukesh Kumar Singla on July 27, but Sohana police again requested the court to extend the time for filing the status report. “A short date may kindly be given to submit status report in the present case after discussion with the senior officers,” ASI Satnam Singh stated in the court.
