the minister on a plea that he sanctioned the police crackdown on yoga guru Baba Ramdev and his supporters post midnight June 4.
The Supreme Court also decided to view the video footage of Delhi Police action against yoga guru Ramdev and his followers. A bench of justices B S Chauhan and Swatanter Kumar decided to watch the two-hour video recording of the entire incident on 5th August at 4.15 PM.
An apex court bench of Justice B.S. Chauhan and Justice Swatanter Kumar, while declining to entertain the plea by Ramdev, said that the court was not inclined to broaden the scope of the of the case and wanted it to be limited to the post-midnight police action.
“We don’t want to expand the scope of the (Court) proceedings. We don’t think it is necessary to issue notice to him (Home Minister Chidambaram)”, Justice Chauhan told the Ramdev counsel Ram Jethamalani.
The court said that its concern was to know what were the circumstances that led to the police action and ensuring that innocent people should not be lathi charged when they are sleeping. “We want to hold the person responsible for this action. We will not go into political consideration (of crackdown).”
“Such incident should not be repeated in future”, the court said.
The court directed all the contending parties to file replies and rejoinders well before that. It gave three days time to the Centre, Delhi government and Delhi police to file what ever it wanted to say and in turn gave Ramdev seven days time file his replies.
Meanwhile Delhi police commissioner in its affidavit told the supreme court though Ramlila ground was booked by Ramdev’s organization for ‘Ashtang Yog Vigyan Shivir’ that was to be held from June 4th onward but it was converted in ‘Bhrashtachar Mitao Camp’ (Corruption eradication camp).
Though the Yoga camp was to be held for two and a half hour (5.00 AM to 7.30m AM) but on the first day itself it did not last more than half an hour.
The affidavit said that there were intelligence reports saying that Ramdev was being targeted with an objective of disrupting the communal harmony all over the country. Thus his security was immediately upgraded to Z+ category.
Police Commissioner said that entire first day was spent in political speeches by different entities. The affidavit said that by the evening of June 4, 2011, situation became serious from point of view of “public order”.
“Since such a large crowd could not fit into the Ramlila ground, there was danger of stampede , and also that the crowd would spill into highly sensitive neighbourhood .