The Madhya Pradesh High Court here on Monday granted bail to two local Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) functionaries charged with dacoity after they forcibly took away a HC judge’s car parked outside Gwalior railway station to rush the ailing vice-chancellor of a private university to a hospital.
A single-judge bench of Justice Sunita Yadav granted bail to ABVP’s Gwalior secretary Himanshu Shrotriya (22) and deputy secretary Sukrit Sharma (24), charged under the Madhya Pradesh Dakaiti Aur Vyapharan Prabhavit Kshetra Adhiniyam (MPDVPK Act), an anti-dacoity law.
The two functionaries of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-affiliated student outfit moved the HC after their bail plea was rejected by Special Judge for dacoity cases Sanjay Goyal in the subordinate court on Wednesday last.
The special judge denied bail to the duo after observing that “one seeks help with politeness and not with force”.
The defendants’ counsel, Bhanu Pratap Singh, told reporters that his clients submitted in the HC that their endeavour was not to commit a crime, but to help a person needing urgent medical assistance and that they were law students and not criminals.
Singh said that while granting bail, the HC found “the duo did not have any criminal record.”
According to additional prosecutor Sachin Agrawal, Shrotriya and Sharma were arrested on December 11 after they snatched the keys of a HC judge’s car from its driver outside Gwalior railway station, where the vehicle was parked, and took the ailing man to a hospital.
The seriously ill man, who was travelling by a train, was identified as Ranjeet Singh (68), the vice-chancellor of a private university in Uttar Pradesh’s Jhansi. He later died of a cardiac arrest, police said.
Two days ago, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Yadav asked the Director General of Police (DGP) to conduct a probe into the incident.
The DGP was asked to ascertain whether the registration of a dacoity case in connection with the incident was justified because the ABVP functionaries had no criminal background, a government official said over the weekend.
On Friday, former CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan wrote a letter to Madhya Pradesh High Court Chief Justice Ravi Malimath seeking forgiveness for the two ABVP office-bearers.
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In his letter written to Chief Justice Malimath, Chouhan said, “As it is a different sort of crime committed for a holy cause and done on humanitarian grounds for saving life, it is worth forgiving. The intention of Himanshu Shrotriya and Sukrit Sharma was not to commit a crime. So keeping in view their future they should be forgiven.”
Sandeep Vaishnav, the ABVP’s state unit secretary, had defended the duo, saying they were trying to help a man whose health condition was deteriorating rapidly and that they did not know the car in question belonged to a high court judge.
Some ABVP men, who were travelling from Delhi to Gwalior by a train, saw a co-passenger’s health condition becoming serious. They passed on the information to other ABVP functionaries at Gwalior station, where the ailing man was brought out of the train, he said.
No ambulance reached for his help for around 25 minutes and as the man’s health condition was deteriorating, the two ABVP activists rushed him to a hospital in a car parked outside the station, but he died, Vaishnav said.
