Allahabad HC orders CBI probe into Mathura clash

Court directs the agency to form a special team to investigate the violence

The Allahabad High Court on Thursday ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the violence in the Jawahar Bagh park area in Mathura in which 24 people, including two senior police officers and many squatters belonging to Swadhin Bharat Vidhik Satyagrah, an armed group led by Ram Vriksh Yadav, were killed.

Yadav, once a follower of Jai Gurudev, who had been occupying the site since 2014, was also killed in the police operation to evict the huge tract of land in Jawahar Bagh on June 2, 2016.

The high court bench headed by Chief Justice D.B. Bhosale and Justice Yashwant Varma also asked the CBI to submit a status report of its probe on May 2 before the court.

Justice Bhosle asked the investigating agency to form a special team to probe the violence, which had brought the armed group into the national limelight.

The court order for the CBI probe came in response to a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by Mathura-based advocate Vijay Pal Singh Tomar and others.

Encroachment issue

Mr Tomar, a former president of the Mathura district bar association, had been consistently raising the issue of encroachment of the public land by the armed groups since 2015.

It was Mr Tomar whose PIL in the Allahabad High Court pushed the authorities into taking action against the squatters in June last year.

In his petition he alleged that the Uttar Pradesh government was “in the know of the dangerous activities happening inside Jawahar Bagh in Mathura unleashed by the illegal armed group but the government sat on repeated requests of the district magistrate for more force so that an operation could be launched to evict the armed group.”

Mr Tomar also alleged in his PIL that “a fair investigation by the UP government could not be expected given that senior members of the Akhilesh Yadav government were seen to be backing the armed group which unleashed the violence.”

While talking to The Hindu , Mr. Tomar alleged that “it was a fit case to be handed over to the central investigating agency because a state cabinet minister and senior members of the incumbent party in UP were allegedly involved in the case.”

“There are reasons to believe that there was a deeper conspiracy behind the incident because the armed group had allegedly received direct and indirect patronage of the State government, and if the government wanted, the armed groups would not have grown to this extent,” he added.

‘Parallel govt’

Yadav was allegedly running a parallel government, complete with administration, revenue and armed forces, within the park which he and his followers had encroached upon since 2014.

He had assembled deadly weapons and explosives which were used against the police when they started the eviction operation at Jawahar Bagh.