The Madhya Pradesh High Court has dismissed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) requesting that the inquiry report on the 2017 Mandsaur firing incident be tabled in the state assembly. The decision was issued by the Indore bench, comprising Justices Vivek Rusia and Justice Binod Kumar Dwivedi, who ruled that the legal timeframe for presenting the report had long expired, and thus no current basis existed for a court-ordered writ to mandate its tabling.
The inquiry, conducted by the Justice Jain Commission, was initiated following the tragic events of June 6, 2017, where six farmers were killed by police gunfire during a protest for better crop prices in Mandsaur. The final report of the commission was submitted to the State Government on June 13, 2018, but it has not been acted upon since.
Former Ratlam MLA Paras Saklecha, the petitioner, argued that under Section 3(4) of the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952, the state government was obliged to table the report in the legislature along with an action taken memorandum within six months of receiving the report. Despite this requirement, the report remained untabled, prompting Saklecha to seek judicial intervention under Article 226 of the Constitution, requesting a writ of mandamus to compel the submission of the report to the Principal Secretary of the MP Vidhan Sabha Secretariat.
However, the division bench noted that if the report had not been presented before the legislature, any member could have raised the issue on the floor as per Supreme Court observations. The court also highlighted that the Commissions of Inquiry Act does not specify any consequences if the report is not tabled within the six-month period, pointing out that this period had expired several years ago.
The court elaborated that the primary objective of the commission was to understand the circumstances leading to the incident and to gather recommendations to prevent similar events in the future. Given the lapse of time and the ongoing criminal proceedings related to the incident, the court found no substantial grounds to compel the tabling of the report at this stage.
