The Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court recently dismissed a plea filed by Jamal Siddiqui,the National President of BJP’s Minority Morcha, seeking a direction from the court to authorities to provide him with 'X' category security.
A division bench of justices Sunil Shukre and Avinash Gharote said: “There has to be some special reason or material to show that additional and special security is indeed justified. After all, the State does so by incurring huge expenditure of public money.”
“Then, there are also dangers involved in providing such special security. One of them could be of any possible misuse of the special security by the person to whom it is provided. This is the reason why there is a well established procedure which must be followed before any decision is taken for providing special or additional security to a person. Such special security would not come as a matter of right and matter of course, rather it would follow the special need of the person and peculiar urgency of the situation,” the court stated.
The order read, “It is the assessment of the State alone, and not of an individual demanding special security, which is material. A person demanding special security, may, for his own reasons see that there is a threat to his life or property or both from the world at large and therefore may lead his life constantly under fear. But, such opinion of a person about danger to his own life or property, in a given case, may only be a figment of imagination or due to some peculiar psychology of that person. But, in reality, the agency entrusted with duty to protect a citizen, may find that the own threat perception of such a person is illusory or unrealistic or blown out of proportion.”
The bench added, “The agency of the State which is under a duty to protect its citizen is required to discharge it’s duty in such a case cautiously, carefully, diligently and in the best of interest of the person concerned and also the State. Such agency would examine the whole issue by making an inquiry into the matter, would collect inputs provided to it by various sources and then would take an appropriate decision regarding how would it perceive the factor of threat to the person demanding security.”
