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CJP leaders Das and Ranka move Delhi High Court; night hearing not taken up, cases shifted to Crime Branch
The two jailed Cockroach Janta Party leaders have challenged their custody extension in the High Court, which did not take up the petition on Tuesday night. Delhi Police have moved the cases against them to the Crime Branch, and a farmers' front has joined the protests.
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The two Cockroach Janta Party leaders held in Tihar Jail went to the Delhi High Court on Tuesday to challenge the order that kept them in custody, but the court did not take up their petitions that night. Their lawyers will now ask for a hearing on Wednesday, the day the two-day extension runs out.
Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka have now spent a week in jail. The party, a youth-led movement founded by Abhijeet Dipke, named Das, an investigative journalist, and Ranka, an IIT Kanpur graduate, as spokespersons in June. On 12 October Delhi Police removed Jantar Mantar from the list of designated protest sites. The next day Das and Ranka climbed over the barricades that had sealed it, waving the national flag, and were chased down and detained. A video posted by Dipke shows the moment. The site had been sealed for several days with yellow metal barricades and a heavy police presence.
The petition and the Crime Branch
On 14 October they were sent to five days of judicial custody in Tihar. On Monday, 19 October, Special Executive Magistrate Ritu Raj added two more days after Delhi Police asked for an extension. The petition, filed through advocate Abhik Chimni, challenges that order. It disputes the grounds for holding them and the rejection of their sureties, and it invokes Article 21 of the Constitution, arguing that their personal liberty has been cut short unlawfully. It also challenges the extension under Section 135(3) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, questioning preventive detention proceedings when no FIR over the Jantar Mantar incident has been mentioned. The proceedings are preventive rather than a trial: they were begun before the Special Executive Magistrate under Sections 126 and 170 of the same law, which deal with keeping the peace and with arrest to prevent an offence.
The magistrate's reasoning is on record. The two had signed peace bonds on 11 October, and the magistrate found that they had allegedly breached them by continuing to call for demonstrations at places no longer designated for protests, and that their release could disturb public peace. The order rejected their sureties: one surety's photograph reportedly did not match his Aadhaar document, and another could not give basic details about Das. The petitioners dispute all of it.
The lawyers asked for an urgent hearing late on Tuesday. The High Court is on its Dussehra vacation, and the request was not taken up. Ratna Singh, the party's head of legal affairs, said the two "should not spend another minute behind bars". The magistrate's own proceedings are also listed for Wednesday, when the extension ends.
Delhi Police have meanwhile moved the cases against the pair to the Crime Branch. Two cases were registered after the leaders entered Connaught Place and Jantar Mantar on 13 October. One has gone to the Crime Branch's Inter State Cell, and by Wednesday's account the second had followed it. Reports differ on the order in which the transfers happened, but not on where the files now sit.
The protest is widening
Outside court, more groups are joining the movement. Actor Prakash Raj said he had attended a meeting of about 200 organisations in Delhi at which the Samyukt Kisan Morcha, the umbrella body of farmers' unions, decided to join the protests over the revision of the voter rolls. The agitation, he said, would grow bigger than the students' protest at Jantar Mantar. The Morcha has asked farmers' organisations to join a protest on Friday, 23 October, and farmers' and Dalit groups plan rallies across Karnataka that day. If the government keeps refusing dialogue, Raj said, voters will remove it.
Supporters of the online movement and opposition parties have protested in recent days. The demand underneath has not changed. Protesters want Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to resign over the revision of the rolls, a charge the Election Commission denies. Dipke has defended the two leaders, saying they are being punished only for "unfurling tricolour at Jantar Mantar", and has challenged the Prime Minister to "show some guts".
Wednesday carries three dates: the magistrate's hearing, the High Court's listing if the lawyers get one, and the Crime Branch's next move. Friday adds a fourth.
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