The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a petition against a decision of the Allahabad High Court which upheld the Uttar Pradesh government’s refusal to grant sanction for prosecuting Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in a 2007 hate speech case.
A Bench of Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana, Justices Hima Kohli and C.T. Ravikumar said the investigation into the First Information Report (FIR) had culminated in a closure report in 2017. A protest petition filed against the closure was still pending in the trial court.
“In the aforesaid circumstances, we do not think it necessary to go into the contentions raised by both sides on the issue of denial of sanction for prosecution,” Justice Ravikumar, who authored the nine-page judgment, held.
However, the apex court has left open the legal questions on the issue of sanction.
The judgment narrated the case against Mr. Adityanath was that he had allegedly made a hate speech “that led to incidents described as ‘2007 Gorakhpur Riots’.” He was a Member of Parliament at the time.
The State government had then directed an investigation by the Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department (CB CID) of the Uttar Pradesh Police.
Several persons had approached the High Court for a transfer of the investigation to an independent investigating agency.
But the High Court had dismissed allegations against the investigation and found no fault in the the State refusing sanction to prosecute Mr. Adityanath.
In the Supreme Court, the petitioners’ lawyer Fuzzail Ahmad Ayyubi argued that Mr. Adityanath had gone on to become the Chief Minister and so it was the Governor, and not the State government, who was the competent authority to decide on the question of sanction.
Countering, senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi said the petition in the Supreme Court was merely an “academic exercise” as a closure report was already filed in the case. Besides, a CFSL report in 2014 had found the CD, which formed the basis of the prosecution, to be tampered with and edited.
