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Weekly Round-Up of Major Decisions of the Courts in India as also Legal Policy Developments

BHOPAL: While Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is continuing his Ashrivad Yatra, two controversial events have hit the headlines. One relates to the supply of shoes to tribals and the other about the dispatch of over one crore letters addressed to women voters of the state.

Of course, the Congress was not involved. Rogues wearing the Congress name on their sleeves busted into tyre shops and tested them in an innovating manner, cast the tyre round a Sikh neck to see how the tyre burned, the Sikh burned. The testing method caught on and Congressi-looking men tried it on other Sikh necks.

The recent times have been a mixed bag for legal developments in dalit rights. While the Supreme Court sought to dilute the protections in the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 last year in a much criticised judgment in Subhash Kashinath Mahajan v. State of Maharashtra [(2018)6SCC454], the Parliament enacted the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities), 2018 to reinstate the diluted protections in the Act, in the form of not granting anticipatory bail or having preliminary enquiry before registering a complaint under the Act.

Jammu and Kashmir has got a political governor after five decades. Former Bihar governor Satya Pal Malik, who has a socialist background, has taken over the reins of the state last week. The last time Kashmir had a political governor was when Karan Singh became the state’s first Governor (1965-67). Earlier governors had either been bureaucrats like Jagmohan, G S Saxena, and Vohra, or former Army officers like K V Krishna Rao and S K Sinha.

Reports that point out that BJP would lose around 100 seats but eventually emerge as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha after the 2019 elections may sound soothing to the ears of the leaders of the party and its rank and file, but this prospect is understood to have unnerved both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. They fear that this could encourage the dissidents within the party to press for a change in leadership.

The Congress leadership has finally announced the panel for preparing the manifesto of the Party for fighting the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls in 2019. The content of the GOP’s manifesto is of crucial importance to the grassroots cadres of the Party since these will be the campaign points and at the base level, the party workers will be facing the BJP’s massive election machinery by articulating the programme and promises mentioned in the manifesto.

Kerala might have witnessed this August the heaviest-ever rainfall since 1924 causing a disastrous flood killing over 300 people, rendering thousands homeless and destroying crops in nearly one million hectares of land, but experts assessing the causes behind the calamity and its impact substantially blame the local authorities and people for the flood intensity and nature of destruction. For long, the people and the administration in the hilly state, where the Western Ghats meet the Arabian Sea through several patches of land, forests, rivers and canals, had ignored or brushed aside the growing illegal quarrying, mining, waste dumping to choke canals, repurposing of forests and high-rise building constructions. And, now, the Keralites and the country are paying a heavy price of this partly man-made flood, financial cost of which has been roughly estimated at a staggering Rs.20,000 crore.

Indian Railways recorded all time high Operating Ratio of
111.51 per cent during the first four months of the current financial year ending July 30, 2018. This means the railways spent rupees 111.51 to earn rupees one hundred during the period, making the behemoth public transporter financially most unviable. This reflects shortfall in the estimated passenger and freight traffic targets with higher outgo of working expenditure including pension payout.

It had been planned to be a lavish celebration on the Pnyx hill next to the Acropolis in Athens where the citizenry would hold popular assemblies in the ancient democratic period.