New Delhi: Senior advocate Sanjay Hegde and lawyer Sadhna Ramachandran, two of the Supreme Court-appointed mediators in the Shaheen Bagh matter on Monday filed their final report before the top court in a sealed cover after having held talks with the anti-CAA/NRC protesters for the last five days. Both Hegde and Ramachandran filed a report on their analysis of the situation as did former Chief Information Commissioner and third mediator Wajahat Habibullah, who filed his affidavit on Sunday.
The bench comprising Justices SK Kaul and KM Joseph took cognizance of the final report filed by the interlocutors and posted the matter for next hearing on Wednesday (February 26), saying that it would need two days to go through the mediators' findings.
The top court is currently hearing petitions seeking removal of protesters from Shaheen Bagh and when the petitioners asked for a copy of the final report of the mediators, the court denied them the liberty, clarifying that it was not the duty of the interlocutors to submit their findings to the petitioner. The court said that the interlocutors' reports were just for its own records.
On Sunday, Habibullah had filed his affidavit in the matter before the SC, saying that the Shaheen Bagh protesters were peacefully demonstrating against legislation and that the Delhi Police had unnecessarily blocked adjacent roads, causing chaos. In fact, Bhim Army Chief Chandra Shekhar Azad and social activist Syed Bahadur Abbas Naqvi, who are both intervening applicants in the matter along with Habibullah also filed a joint affidavit in the Apex court on Sunday coming to similar conclusions as to their fellow intervener.
In his affidavit filed in the top court, Habibullah has contended that "Shaheen Bagh stands tall as a firm example of peaceful dignified dissent, more so in the face of various instances of state-sponsored violence on similar dissents across India." Naqvi and Azad, in their joint affidavit, have alleged that "the present ruling dispensation, at the behest of its political masters, had devised a strategy of extinguishing these protests by falsely attributing violence and acts of vandalism to peaceful protestors".