Former chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has sought forgiveness from Madhya Pradesh High Court Chief Justice Ravi Malimath for two ABVP activists who were arrested for taking the car of a judge to transport an ailing person to a Gwalior hospital. In a letter to the Chief Justice, Chouhan termed the incident a “different sort of crime committed for a holy cause”, and urged him to forgive them.
The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad's Gwalior secretary Himanshu Shrotriya (22) and deputy secretary Sukrit Sharma (24) were arrested on Monday under the MP Dakaiti Aur Vyapharan Prabhavit Kshetra Adhiniyam, an anti-dacoity law, after they snatched the car's key from its driver at Gwalior railway station and took Ranjeet Singh, VC of a private university in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, to a hospital.
Their bail plea was rejected on Wednesday, and they are in judicial custody at present. ABVP is the student wing of the RSS.
“As it is a different sort of crime committed for a holy cause and done on humanitarian ground for saving life, it is worth forgiving. The intention of Himanshu Shrotriya (22) and Sukrit Sharma (24) was not to commit a crime. So keeping in view their future they should be forgiven,” Chouhan wrote in the letter to the Chief Justice.
What had the court said earlier?
A special court judge for dacoity cases Sanjay Goyal had observed while denying them bail that one seeks help with politeness and not with force.
Citing the police diary in the incident, the judge said that an ambulance, which was ideal for such purposes, had arrived to ferry the ailing man.
What did ABVP's MP unit secretary say on the incident?
Earlier, speaking on the issue, Sandeep Vaishnav, the ABVP's MP 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 belonged to a high court judge.
Some ABVP men, who were travelling from Delhi to Gwalior on a train, saw a passenger's health becoming serious. They passed on the information to other ABVP functionaries at Gwalior station.
The activists deboarded the sick man at Gwalior station, but no ambulance reached for his help for around 25 minutes, he said.
“As the man’s health condition was deteriorating, the ABVP activists rushed him to a hospital in a car parked outside the station but he died,” Vaishnav said.
As per Gwalior's Inderganj City Superintendent of Police Ashok Jadon, Ranjeet Singh (68), who was the vice-chancellor of a private university in Uttar Pradesh's Jhansi, died of cardiac failure according to a preliminary post-mortem report.
(With PTI inputs)
