Courts | SabrangIndia News Related to Human Rights Sun, 01 Jan 2017 17:02:50 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 https://sabrangindia.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Favicon_0.png Courts | SabrangIndia 32 32 How this self-proclaimed pro-Dalit government has all but buried the Rohith Vemula case https://sabrangindia.in/how-self-proclaimed-pro-dalit-government-has-all-buried-rohith-vemula-case/ Sun, 01 Jan 2017 17:02:50 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2017/01/01/how-self-proclaimed-pro-dalit-government-has-all-buried-rohith-vemula-case/ How this self-proclaimed pro-Dalit government has all but buried the Rohith Vemula case Investigation has been stalled as if the abetment of suicide case hinges on his caste. Both killed themselves in hostel rooms. Each tragedy was followed by the registration of an abetment of suicide case: one in January 2016 and the other in […]

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]]> How this self-proclaimed pro-Dalit government has all but buried the Rohith Vemula case

Investigation has been stalled as if the abetment of suicide case hinges on his caste.

How this self-proclaimed pro-Dalit government has all but buried the Rohith Vemula case

Both killed themselves in hostel rooms. Each tragedy was followed by the registration of an abetment of suicide case: one in January 2016 and the other in October. The prime accused in the case of PhD scholar Rohith Vemula was the vice chancellor of Hyderabad Central University, P Appa Rao, while in the case of PG medical student Sandhya Rani, it was the gynaecology professor of Guntur Medical College, VAA Lakshmi. The Guntur police arrested Lakshmi within a month, along with five others who had allegedly helped her go underground after Sandhya’s death. By contrast, the Cyberabad police, even 11 months after Rohith Vemula’s death, is yet to arrest Rao – or any of the other five accused persons named in the first information report.

This is despite the fact that the FIR lodged by Rohith Vemula’s comrade, Dontha Prashanth, is a more serious one. For, besides alleging abetment of suicide under Section 306 of the Indian Penal Code, it invokes provisions of the Prevention of Atrocities Act. Applicable to cases where the victims are either Dalits or Adivasis, the special law enhances the maximum penalty for abetment of suicide from 10 years of imprisonment to life sentence. But, ironically, the very invocation of this Act has ended up serving as an excuse for holding up this politically fraught case. At a year-end review meeting with the media last week, Cyberabad police commissioner Sandeep Shandilya claimed that the case could make no progress unless and until it was officially clarified that Rohith Vemula was indeed a Dalit. The need for such a clarification is curious given that Rohith Vemula did very much have a scheduled caste certificate, whose validity had never been questioned in his lifetime.

Orchestrated campaign

If the investigation into his suicide is still subject to a fresh determination of his caste identity, it’s because of a campaign orchestrated by his political adversaries belonging to the extended Sangh Parivar in an obvious bid to shield the accused named in the FIR. Though Rohith Vemula had been driven to suicide in the pursuit of his Ambedkarite politics, the object of the campaign has been to establish, somehow or the other, that Rohith Vemula himself was not Dalit. In the beginning, a range of Hindutva voices including Union minister Sushma Swaraj tried to take advantage of the fact that one of his divorced parents was not Dalit. An error in the application for his brother’s birth certificate was also sought to be exploited thereafter. Such diversionary tactics have been allowed to stall the case, which levels allegations against not only Rao but also Union minister Bandaru Dattatreya, two local Bharatiya Janata Party leaders and two Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad leaders. The charade involves members of the ruling dispensation and the law enforcement machinery, at the Centre as well as the states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

Though he had been brought up in Guntur town single handedly by his Dalit mother, tailor Radhika Vemula, his detractors came up with a counter narrative citing his father, security guard Mani Kumar Vemula, who had long lost contact with his children.

Since the father belonged to an “other backward class” community, it was made out that Rohith Vemula could not but fall in the same category, although the absentee father lived more than a 100 kms away from Guntur town in a village called Gurazala. Much as it fits the Hindu right’s ploy to obfuscate the case, this patriarchal presumption about Rohith Vemula’s caste flies in the face of the settled law.

Settled law

The presumption that the child would belong to the caste of the father in an inter-caste marriage is “by no means”, as the Supreme Court laid down in 2012, “conclusive or irrebuttable”. The judgment added that “it is open to the child of such marriage to lead evidence to show that he was brought up by the mother who belonged to the scheduled caste/scheduled tribe.” It prescribed two criteria for the child in such a situation to be considered a Dalit or Adivasi. One, that “he did not have any advantageous start in life but on the contrary suffered the deprivations, indignities, humilities and handicaps like any other member of the community to which his mother belonged.” Two, “that he was always treated as a member of the community to which his mother belonged not only by that community but by people outside the community as well.”

For someone who suffered a “social boycott” along with four other Dalit students at the hands of the university administration, and for someone who famously said in his suicide note that he had been “reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility”, Rohith Vemula did surely fulfill the Supreme Court’s twin criteria for being regarded as a Dalit despite having a non-Dalit father. So, it was no surprise that when the National Commission of Scheduled Castes had asked him to address the doubt raised by Mani Kumar about Rohith Vemula’s caste identity, the collector of Guntur district, Kantilal Dande, affirmed in writing in April that as per the “available revenue records”, the deceased was very much a Dalit. Dwelling on his antecedents, Dande recorded that Rohith Vemula’s mother was a Dalit who had been adopted in her infancy by an OBC family and that after her divorce she had returned to Guntur town to live with her children in a Dalit settlement. In the light of these findings, the National Commission of Scheduled Castes advised the commissioner of Cyberabad police in June “to complete the investigation and file the report at the earliest, in the court of law.”

The police, however, disregarded the call for urgency from the Commission, which was then headed by Congress MP PL Punia. The latest excuse for their continuing inaction, as evident from the October minutes of the Commission, is a U-turn made by Guntur collector.

Reopening the issue of Rohith Vemula’s caste identity, Dande told the Commission that the district-level scrutiny committee had received “certain representations on this subject” and it would take “some more time” to dispose them of. Betraying the lengths to which the government and the Hindutva camp at large have gone to scuttle the case, those representations were apparently prompted by a discrepancy in an application filed in 2014 for the birth certificate of Rohith Vemula’s younger brother, Raja Vemula.

The Union minister of social justice, Thaawar Chand Gehlot, pointed out triumphantly in a press interview, as if it was a clincher, that the application signed by Radhika Vemula had mentioned that Raja Vemula was an OBC. But Gehlot overlooked the crucial fact that Raja, as disclosed in the Guntur collector’s original report in April, had already obtained his Scheduled Caste certificate in 2007 and that his caste identity was anyway irrelevant to the application for his birth certificate. This attempt to make a mountain out of a molehill has not been given up even after Rohith Vemula’s paternal grandfather, Venkateswarlu Vemula, came up with a plausible explanation for the circumstances in which that superfluous, though erroneous, reference to Raja’s caste came to be made in the birth certificate application. Rebutting Gehlot’s statement, Venkateswarlu Vemula wrote to the Guntur collector in June saying that as the birth certificate had to be obtained from Gurazala, where Radhika Vemula had lived before the break-up of her marriage, he had taken her signature on a blank sheet and given it to an official to draft the application on it.

After granting interim relief to some of the accused persons, the Hyderabad high court has not listed their petitions for a hearing in the last eight months. As a result, the complainant in the case has been deprived of a chance to challenge the high-level attempt to get the influential accused off the hook. Meanwhile, a judicial inquiry into Rohith Vemula’s suicide, Justice Roopanwal Commission, went out of its way to deny his Dalit identity. If a petty mistake in a handwritten application for a birth certificate is eventually used to revoke a lawfully issued caste certificate, it will be a travesty of justice. The invocation of Prevention of Atrocities Act provisions has already been turned into an opportunity to divert the investigation from Rohith Vemula’s death to his caste. Rather than his tormentors, he is himself being put in the dock, posthumously.

But then, even if it is ruled that Rohith Vemula belonged to an OBC, the six persons accused of abetting his suicide under the special Dalit law will remain liable to be tried for the same offence under the general criminal law. Consider the prompt action taken against the six accused persons in the abetment of suicide case booked two months ago in Rohith Vemula’s home district for the death of OBC medical student Sandhya Rani. The contrasting trajectories of the two cases could not have been more telling.

The author has authored  When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and its Aftermath

Courtesy: Scroll.in

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]]> How Justice is Literally ‘Compromised’ in Stalking and Sexual Violence Cases in India https://sabrangindia.in/how-justice-literally-compromised-stalking-and-sexual-violence-cases-india/ Wed, 21 Sep 2016 10:36:58 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2016/09/21/how-justice-literally-compromised-stalking-and-sexual-violence-cases-india/ Popular culture and  the ‘system’ itself – including police and courts – is complicit in seeking ways of rehabilitating sexual violence as romance, love or even marriage. The mother (C) of an Indian girl who was raped and set on fire cries out during her daughter's funeral in Greater Noida near the Indian capital New […]

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]]> Popular culture and  the ‘system’ itself – including police and courts – is complicit in seeking ways of rehabilitating sexual violence as romance, love or even marriage.


The mother (C) of an Indian girl who was raped and set on fire cries out during her daughter's funeral in Greater Noida near the Indian capital New Delhi on March 9, 2016. Image: AFP

In countless instances of popular Indian cinema, stalking is valorised as a macho and successful romance strategy. It isn’t just popular culture – the ‘system’ itself – including police and courts – is complicit in seeking ways of rehabilitating sexual violence as romance, love or even marriage.
 
This complicity is most clearly reflected in the phenomenon of ‘compromises’ brokered by police and even courts in rape and sexual violence cases all over the country. This phenomenon persists in spite of repeated Supreme Court judgements (Hindu, Indian Express) reminding that sexual violence crimes in India’s criminal justice system are generally non-compoundable and therefore not open to out of court settlements or compromises.     
 
It is significant that a closer look at the two recent instances of women being stabbed to death by stalkers in Inderpuri and Burari in Delhi reveal a history of ‘compromises’ brokered by the police.   
 
In the Burari case, "Karuna, who was working as a teacher, had filed a complaint against Surender five months ago but the police say that the families had submitted letters of a ‘compromise’, and no action was taken."
 
In the Inderpuri case, "Two days before this gruesome crime, 28-year-old Laxmi was stabbed to death by her stalker in West Delhi's Inderpuri area. Twenty-six-year-old Sanjay Kumar had allegedly harassed Laxmi for the past six years, despite repeated complaints filed by Laxmi and her husband, Manoj.

After Laxmi's complaint, Sanjay was arrested on charges of stalking but was released on bail. Laxmi's family says that even though they had complained earlier, no action was taken because Sanjay's family gave a written undertaking that he would stop."
 
What was the basis on which Sanjay, the accused in the Burari case, secured bail? Was the ‘written undertaking’ by his family of his good conduct a factor that the court considered? Bail is a right and should be the norm – but one of the strongest bases for refusing bail is when the accused is in a position to influence the investigation by intimidating the victim or witnesses, or in a position to harm the victim or witnesses.
 
Cases in India drag on for years because we lack enough courts and judges – the delay deters victim-survivors from complaining, increases the pressure on victims and the chances of a ‘compromise’, and also puts victim-survivors in danger of their lives. In stalking cases, should there not be any protocol for monitoring the case if the accused is out on bail – to check if he is again harassing the victim, if he is maintaining distance from her or not?
 
Unfortunately, much of the media coverage in the Delhi stabbing cases has avoided any discussion of chronic ‘compromises’ brokered/legitimised by police, and their role in making these killings possible. The PTI story on the Inderpuri case referred to the stalker as a ‘lover’. TV channels aired CCTV footage of the Burari stabbing repeatedly, focusing mainly on the ‘insensitivity’ of people watching who did not intervene to ‘save’ the victim.
 
Social media mirrored the same tendency – there was very little reflection on our tendency as a society to see stalking as ‘romance’ and broker compromises in stalking and sexual violence cases; only an easy self-righteousness about passive bystanders watching the stabbing without heroic intervention.
 
How many of us would know how to intervene to disarm a man armed with a knife, and attempt to do so when a murder is being committed? The question to ask – and as far as I know no journalist has yet asked or tried to answer – would be: did any of the eyewitnesses call the police, which as responsible citizens they could and should have done? Did the police respond, and how soon?        
 
In India, consensual elopements, especially inter-caste or same gotra or same-sex relationships, are reported by women’s parents as ‘abduction/rape’. Meanwhile, cases where the woman herself has complained of rape and expressed abhorrence for her assailant are sought to be ‘settled’ by marrying the victim off to the rapist!
 
Rape is seen as harm against the victim’s marriageability, so the fact that the victim-survivor is offered and often accepted by courts as grounds for ‘compromise’ or leniency towards the rape convict!
 
Why are there no public campaigns by governments on sexual violence that make it clear that consensual elopements are not rape; that rape is a harm against women’s bodily integrity and autonomy and not against her virginity or marriageability; that stalking is not ‘love’; that rape or stalking or any other form of sexual violence cannot be settled by ‘compromises’ whether these are brokered by khaps, families, cops or courts?
 
In Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party complains, as its predecessor did, that it does not have jurisdiction over the Delhi police. But surely the Delhi government has a duty to run public campaigns against rape culture? Surely the Delhi government has a duty to monitor implementation of the laws against sexual and gender violence, and can be much more proactive in offering institutional support to survivors of sexual violence, thereby helping them resist pressure to ‘compromise’ and file complaints against police if they collude in attempts at ‘compromise’?
 
Instead, from the AAP government also, we are getting more of the same patriarchal posturing – calls by ministers for public hanging of rapists, or rhetoric against the Delhi police on ‘women’s safety,’ with no action to actually change the patriarchal matrix in which crimes against women play out and justice is ‘compromised.’         
 
(Kavita Krishnan is secretary, All India Progressive Women’s Association). 
 

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]]> How India’s justice system is giving in to the mob https://sabrangindia.in/how-indias-justice-system-giving-mob/ Sat, 27 Aug 2016 06:30:31 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2016/08/27/how-indias-justice-system-giving-mob/ As a paranoid nationalism takes hold, police and courts are pressured to discard the rule of law, and victims turn suspects. India is on a slippery slope.   Photo Courtesy: Indiens.com I have, for the record, never been to Pakistan. I am acutely aware of how that nation's bleed-them-with-a-thousand-cuts policy works, how it has ended […]

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]]> As a paranoid nationalism takes hold, police and courts are pressured to discard the rule of law, and victims turn suspects. India is on a slippery slope.
 

Photo Courtesy: Indiens.com

I have, for the record, never been to Pakistan. I am acutely aware of how that nation's bleed-them-with-a-thousand-cuts policy works, how it has ended bleeding them instead and in the process changed their founding essence. I suppose that automatically makes me a nationalist.
 

But, here’s the thing: I am very keen to meet Pakistanis, and the few I have met make me eager to go there some day. Indeed, there is no country in the world I am keener to visit. My wife's old homeland lies there, and someday we will take up the offer made by a hospitable Pakistani to visit the old home towns of my in-laws and listen to qawwalis in the moonlight – under armed guard, of course. By now, you are thinking, this man is anti-national. File a sedition case.

This line of reasoning may sound ridiculous – to put it mildly – but that is how paranoid, insecure and angry people think, and there is every evidence Indians are beginning to nurture the same bizarre version of nationalism that has consumed Pakistan. As this process progresses, history and the world beyond tell us, the first thing to be sacrificed is the rule of law. The mob becomes the law.

Courting sedition

That is why a court in lush, prosperous Kodagu – a former princely state now integrated into Karnataka – will, instead of throwing it out, hear a petition on Saturday filed by a local lawyer, accusing former Congress MP and actor Ramya (real name, Divya Spandana) of sedition for, well, liking Pakistanis and their hospitality.

That is why Amnesty International India finds itself being investigated for sedition charges merely because it hosted an event where some in the audience shouted Kashmiri freedom slogans – never mind that the law and various interpretations of it emphasise that slogans can never be seditious unless accompanied by the threat of violence. That is why, earlier this week, when a mob in Palwal, Haryana, attacked a van suspected of carrying beef, the police intervened, and instead of checking if the meat was really beef, buried it because the mob demanded it, then stepped back to let them burn the van. As for the three men in the van – two of them Muslim – they were arrested, of course, and sent to jail. That is why all manner of recent atrocities have ended with the victims of criminality ending up as the accused.

Mob rule a slippery slope

When the mob dictates how the law will be implemented or discarded, societies start down a slippery slope. When the mob's motives are religion and/or nationalism, the moral high ground so vacated is almost impossible to regain.

We see that in Pakistan, where the police and judges, as a matter of routine, let off murderers who kill minorities on imagined blasphemies of Islam, slit the throats of their own daughters and sisters for what they believe to be the act of dishonouring families by exercising choice in marriage or life.

Further West, Turkey's rationality is fast slipping away, as a paranoid president uses vague and dubious laws to arrest journalists, judges and anyone who might not agree with him. This week in Turkey, a court ordered special issues of a socialist newspaper seized, the telecommunications regulator blocked access to two news agency websites and various editors and reporters were arrested and detained on either vague terrorism charges or held with no declared reason.

To our east, Thailand uses its lèse majesté (literally, injured majesty) law to imprison anyone considered to have insulted the king, which is why a man who insulted the king’s dog faces imprisonment (15 years), as does a taxi driver whose mocking of the king was recorded on a passenger's mobile phone, and an activist who dared cite research to question if a battle led by the king's 16th-century forefather had taken place.

In supposedly secular France, wearing a certain kind of clothing – let’s say it, Islamic clothing – is becoming illegal. The latest unreal case unfoldedthis week on a beach in Nice when armed police forced a woman to, well, unclothe, by removing the layer of her burkini that covered her head. In another case, a mother with children was made to take off her headscarf, as other beach-goers shouted “go home” and applauded the police. As internet memes pointed out, the French have no problem with a nun's habit or a full-body wetsuit (they might want to take inspiration fromScotland and Canada, where the police have approved the hijab as part of optional official uniform).

On the edge of anarchy

There are a few things in common in the cases and countries I mentioned. First, these are all supposed to be democracies with varying degrees of freedom. Second, these democracies are witnessing increasingly bizarre and illogical interpretations of criminality. Third, for whatever reason, the bizarreness is correlated with a decline in the democratic process. Fourth, that decline is clearly hastened as the justice system wilts in the face of the mob and its paranoia.

In India, it is rare that the police and courts side with the law and against the government of the day. Thus far, this has been made amply clear in places and among people on the fringes of what we could now describe as India’s “collective conscience”, which the Supreme Court once described as a reason to hang a man whose conviction appeared riddled with doubts. In the North East, Chhattisgarh and Kashmir, the Centre has almost never allowed the prosecution of security forces for murder, violating fundamental rights and other laws of the land.

When this collective conscience enters government policy, anarchy is just a step away. The Congress began this policy of appeasing the mob – opening the gates of the Babri Masjid, legislating its way past the rights of Shah Bano and millions of Muslim women – and dragged India to a point where the gates of hate can be forced open by anyone with an agenda and a backing mob.

Appeasing the mob

With the advent of the Bharatiya Janata Party, majoritarian mob rule is accelerating most visibly in the proliferation of vigilante organisations cloaked in religious rationale, from fighting “love jihad” to protecting the holy cow. Far from cracking down and sending a message that mob rule cannot prevail, police, courts and governments are increasingly either looking the other way or providing official sanction to the mob as the Maharashtra government has done by issuing volunteers with identity cards to monitor the beef ban. More than 2,000 applications, a large number from Hindutva groups, have poured in.

No good can come from Maharashtra's sanction to official vigilantism, which comes after the state tried to ban the consumption of beef, a move struck down by the high court. So, India is poised on that slippery slope. The courts will indicate, in the coming days, if they intend to hold firm or join the slide into the cesspit of paranoid nationalism. As for me, I'm off to befriend a Pakistani.

Courtesy: Scroll.in

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]]> Gujarat Dalit Clerk’s Suicide: End Caste Discrimination Say Colleagues https://sabrangindia.in/gujarat-dalit-clerks-suicide-end-caste-discrimination-say-colleagues/ Wed, 06 Apr 2016 19:50:17 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2016/04/06/gujarat-dalit-clerks-suicide-end-caste-discrimination-say-colleagues/ Ketan Koradia’s father Dalpat, mother Jasu (second from right) and sister at their home in Ahmedabad.  Courtesy: Javed Raja, The Indian Express Can there be Caste Discrimination even within our Courts? Ketan Koradia’s suicide on April 4, 2016 in Ahmedabad provides a shocking answer. A 31-year-old Dalit who worked as a clerk in an Ahmedabad […]

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Ketan Koradia’s father Dalpat, mother Jasu (second from right) and sister at their home in Ahmedabad.  Courtesy: Javed Raja, The Indian Express

Can there be Caste Discrimination even within our Courts?
Ketan Koradia’s suicide on April 4, 2016 in Ahmedabad provides a shocking answer.

A 31-year-old Dalit who worked as a clerk in an Ahmedabad court, Ketan took his life after experiencing everyday discrimination . In the FIR, his father alleged five court officials – C K Trivedi, G J Shah, R P Barot, K C Bhavsar and Bhati Saheb – were responsible for his son's death. "To harass Ketan, he was transferred without any order to court number 7. Again, he was transferred to court number 14 in February without giving any reason, which depressed him further," his father said in the FIR.

At the condolence meeting after his death, as colleagues of Ketan Koradia called for an end to “caste-based discrimination”, back home, his parents recalled how a boy who had made them proud slid into “depression” because he was “harassed” by co-workers. The condolence meeting for Ketan began at 3 pm April 5, the courtroom was packed. Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate M F Khatri sat in the middle of about a hundred staff members, mostly clerks. "The true condolence to Ketan would be to talk about casteist discrimination and burden of too much work. He was transferred to this court's bench despite the fact that he had no knowledge of how courts work. He only knew accounts," said a young employee. Another said, "Caste-based discrimination does happen here. I won't name anyone but a judge remarked about a clerk, 'Aa toh adivasi che (he is a tribal)' to indicate that the clerk was not competent. This is simply not done."

Before taking his own life on the night of April 4, a Sunday, who was posted as a junior clerk in the Metropolitan Magistrate’s Court in Ahmedabad’s Gheekanta area, is reported to have written down names of five of his colleagues who allegedly harassed him by making casteist remarks. “They (the accused) once broke an earthen pot after my son drank water from it. They would never share a meal with my son and would keep him away while eating lunch in office. His colleagues would address him as a Dalit or a BC (backward caste). He dealt with this on a daily basis ever since he joined work,” his 50-year-old father Dalpat Koradia said, sitting at his home in Danilimda, a predominantly Dalit neighbourhood. “When he was born, we had nothing. My wife and I used to sell clothes on a handcart and we raised Ketan and his sister Sangeeta with great difficulty.

He got the court job at a salary of Rs 18,000 per month. We were so happy,” Dalpat said. A relative said Ketan had got engaged to a teacher in February, and that “he was happy”.Ketan’s mother Jasu said he was a bright student who finished M.Com and got a government job in 2013. Meanwhile, a look at the room where he hanged himself seemed to suggest Ketan was looking for another job, and study books and an admit card pointed to him having taken an exam for the deputy mamlatdar’s post in March last year. One of his friends confirmed he was “unhappy” in his current job.

Shuddhikaran in the Allahabad High Court in 2000

Fourteen years ago, in year 2000, The Times of India, had reported on August 5 how a Dalit Judge had appealed in the Supreme Court against his compulsory retirement in the aftermath of an incident in which his courtroom was washed with `Ganga jal' by his `upper' caste successor.  The incident took place in Allahabad when Bharthari Prasad, then additional sessions judge, was transferred to another court and replaced by A K Srivastava in June 1998. Newspaper reports then said Srivastava had got the entire chamber and its furniture washed with `Ganga jal' because it was previously occupied by a judicial officer belonging to a Scheduled Caste.

Acting on the reports, the sessions judge summoned Bharthari Prasad and asked him to contradict the charge. Since he had “no hand or role'' in the publication of the news reports, Prasad said he could not refute them. Upon this, the sessions judge ordered an inquiry. The court's staff confirmed the reports that the chamber and its furniture were indeed washed.

The room's new incumbent, Srivastava, had thereafter also admitted that he got the chamber washed but pleaded he had got it done because he was an asthma patient. He, however, denied `Ganga jal' was used for the purpose. Curiously, the inquiry officer did not record the statements of those who had actually conducted the `cleansing operation'.

A heart patient undergoing treatment at Jaslok hospital at Mumbai and advised to get a pacemaker fixed, Prasad was thereafter transferred to Mainpuri within a month. Soon he was locked in a long legal battle with the government as he refused to assume charge at Mainpuri. He was suspended, chargesheeted and subsequently compulsorily retired. The Allahabad high court did not set aside the retirement order nor did it ask the government to allow Prasad to retain his official residence for areasonable period of time.

Prasad's counsel, R K Jain, had then argued before a Supreme Court Bench headed by Chief Justice A S Anand  that Prasad's was a case which demonstrates that "class bias still persists against the members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.''  Justice Anand admitted Prasad's petition for hearing and ordered that he not be evicted from his official residence till further orders. Jain had also pointed out to the court that Prasad had suffered an adverse entry in his annual confidential report on the ground that he was "punctual and dismissed cases which lacked evidence''.
 

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