The police issued notice to the Sumayya mosque in Nanded, asking its office-bearers to refrain from criticising the Maharashtra government’s ban on the sale of beef and to desist from participation in protests on the ban. The notice has been issued under Section 149 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which says: “Every police officer may interpose for the purpose of preventing and shall, to the best of his ability, prevent, the commission of any cognisable offence.”
Former Chief Minister and Congress State president Ashok Chavan asked: “what kind of a fatwa is this?” He accused the BJP-Sena government of attempting to polarise the State “religiously and socially” while lashing out at it for curtailing the right to protest.
The police have called for a departmental inquiry into the case, and Subash Rathod, inspector who issued the notice, has allegedly been transferred to the control room. Superintendent of Police, Nanded, Premjit Singh Dahiya was quoted by a news agency as saying that a grammatical error may have given the notice an entirely new dimension. Mr. Rathod may have missed the word “provocative” in his notice and mistakenly typed only “speech”, Mr. Dahiya said.
Azhar Tamboli, an activist with the Pune-based Maharashtra Action Committee, said the police’s explanation was an unsuccessful attempt to cover up its blunder. Mr. Tamboli said that while the police were in its jurisdiction to seek “cooperation” of local communities, they did not have the right to ask anybody not to participate in a morcha. “The notice, written in Marathi, has no scope to incorporate the word inflammatory or provocative anywhere if you carefully read it. The theory that it was due to a grammatical error falls flat as the notice clearly asks the mosque secretary not to participate in the morcha,” Mr. Tamboli said.
