In an important ruling a bench of Gujarat High Court observed that in riot related cases all members of a mob involved in rioting should be held guilty.
The HC bench comprising Justices GB Shah and KS Jhaveri, however, said that the cases of riots also require careful handling. Though the order was given on February 11 but it was uploaded on Gujarat HC’s website on Tuesday. The order was given in connection with a 13-year-old case of riots in which the court reduced life sentence of as many as seven convicts in 10 years of rigorous imprisonment.
The accused were merely passive onlookers who joined the mob out of curiosity and they had no intention and did not share the common object of the unlawful assembly, the court said after appreciating all the evidences on record.
While giving judgement the court also maintained that serious injuries and even death resulting due to riots are of frequent occurrence in the state and cases relating to such riots require careful handling. It also maintained that the greater danger is of innocent persons being implicated along with the guilty, owing to the tendency of the parties, in such cases, to try to implicate falsely, as many of their enemies, as they can.
In fact the court passed the order after hearing convicts who had challenged the order of a lower court in 2006. The lower court had sentenced them to life imprisonment in murder, dacoity and rioting case. Nearly 1,500 people had gathered at Shah Alam area of Ahmedabad on November 7, 2003 where they murder a person named Mukesh Panchal.