The CBI, alleging irregularities in Delhiâs excise policy 2021-22, on Friday, filed an FIR against 15 persons, including Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, as accused. Among the accused are then Excise Commissioner Arva Gopi Krishna, Deputy Commissioner Anand Tiwari, and Assistant Commissioner Pankaj Bhatnagar. The others include Vijay Nair, former chief executive officer of Only Much Louder, an entertainment and event management company (Mumbai); Manoj Rai, former employee of Pernod Richard, Amandeep Dhal, director of Brinco Sales Private Limited (Delhi); Sameer Mahendru, managing director of Indospirit Group; Amit Arora, director of Buddy Retail Private Limited (Delhi); Dinesh Arora; Mahadev Liquors; Sunny Marwah authorised signatory of Mahadev Liquors; Arun Ramchandra Pillai and Arjun Pandey. Earlier, the CBI searched 21 locations, including the premises of Sisodia, in connection with the alleged irregularities in the State governmentâs previous Excise Policy. The searches, in seven States and a Union Territory, were also carried out on the premises of the then Excise Commissioner Arava Gopi Krishna and two more public servants, according to a CBI official. Confirming that a CBI team had reached his residence, Sisodia through his Twitter handle said he was disappointed that those doing good work in the country were being harassed. âThat is why our country could not become No.1,â he said. Sisodia, who holds the excise portfolio, said he would cooperate in the probe in order to find the truth, which would be established in court. He said that nothing incriminating had been found against him so far. Stating that earlier the then Health Minister Satyendar Jain was arrested and now he was being targeted, Sisodia alleged the action was being taken to stop the good work being done in the areas of education and health in Delhi. Last month, Delhi Lieutenant-Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena had recommended a CBI probe into the revamped Excise Policy. According to an assessment report, the Delhi Excise Policy 2021-22 involved alleged violations and procedural lapses. It was suspected that the policy led to a loss of over â¹150 crore to the exchequer. Recently, Lieutenant-Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena suspended 11 officials, including the then Excise Commissioner and Deputy Excise Commissioner Anand Kumar Tiwari, in the same matter. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had then dismissed the allegations, stating that Sisodia was being targeted without any basis. Reacting to Fridayâs developments, Kejriwal said the CBI raid at his junior colleagueâs house was the result of their good performance which is being appreciated globally. âThe day Delhiâs Education model was appreciated and Manish Sisodiaâs photo appeared on the front page of New York Times, the Centre sent CBI at the residence of Manish. âCBI is welcome. Will extend full cooperation. Earlier also there were raid and probe. Nothing came out. Nothing will come out now also,â Kejriwal tweeted. The Congress said the ârelentless misuseâ of agencies against political rivals erodes their credibility and gives an opportunity even for the corrupt to get away. Soon after CBI raids were conducted at the residence of Sisodia, Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera said the honest end up paying the price in such processes. âThe flip side to relentless misuse of agencies against political rivals is that even legitimate, rightful actions of agencies come under a cloud of suspicion. In the process, the corrupt get away hiding behind the âmisuseâ argument and the honest end up paying the price,â Khera said on Twitter. Describing Sisodia as the best Education Minister of Independent India, Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann said the CBI raid at the Delhi Deputy Chief Ministerâs residence was the reward for the Delhi governmentâs good performance being appreciated globally. âManish Sisodia is the best Education Minister of Independent India. Today the largest U.S. newspaper NYT printed his photo on the front page. And today Modi ji sent CBI to his house. How will India progress like this?â Mann said in a tweet in Hindi. Other Ministers in the Bhagwant Mann-led Aam Aadmi Party government in Punjab too attacked the BJP-led Centre after the CBI raid at Mr. Sisodiaâs house. âThe Day no. 1 Newspaper of the no. 1 country in the world recognises Delhi govtâs Education Model & @msisodia ji as best education minister ever. Same Morning CBI is sent to Manish jiâ house by Shameless BJP. It proves BJP doesnât want India to have perfect govt Schools,â Punjabâs Minister of School Education and Jails, Harjot Singh Bains, said in a tweet. Past judgments could aid Supreme Court to examine premature release of Bilkis Bano case convicts The Supreme Court has enough ammunition in the form of past judgments to examine the Gujarat governmentâs premature release of 11 convicts who were sentenced to life imprisonment for the 2002 Bilkis Bano gangrape case. For one, on April 23, 2019, the court, while awarding her â¹50 lakh in compensation, described how the âbrutal, diabolic, gruesome, horrific acts of violenceâ committed on her has left an âindelible imprint on her mind which will continue to torment and cripple herâ. The apex court had noted that the then 21-year-old and pregnant Bilkis was ârepeatedly gangrapedâ. She was a âmute and helpless witness to her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter butchered to deathâ. She had lost all the members of her family while fleeing the mayhem and violence of the 2002 riots. The court said she had lived the life of a nomad, an orphan. The State governmentâs decision to remit the sentence of the 11 convicts has raised a furious public outcry. Civil rights groups have urged the Supreme Court to revoke the remission. Bilkisâs family has told the media that they are scared of what may happen to them in the future. It was as recently as in April 2022 that an apex court Bench led by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud had said that the state cannot exercise its remission powers arbitrarily. The court, in State of Haryana Vs. Mohinder Singh, has underscored that the grant of remission should be âinformed, fair and reasonableâ. In Rajan Vs. Home Secretary, Department of Tamil Nadu, the top court has held that âgrant of premature release is not a matter of privilege but is the power coupled with duty conferred on the appropriate governmentâ. The court has said that âremission should not undermine the nature of crime committedâ. The court has, in Laxman Naskar Vs. Union of India, laid down five questions which should feature in the Stateâs mind before deciding on remission. They are â whether the offence is an individual act of crime that does not affect society; whether there is a chance of the crime being repeated in future; whether the convict has lost the potentiality to commit crime; whether any purpose is being served in keeping the convict in prison; and socio-economic conditions of the convictâs family. The fact that the crimes were committed on Bilkis in the background of violence which affected the entire State; the apprehensions voiced by her family following the release of the convicts, and the warm welcome reported to have been accorded to the 11 men when they came out of jail, make the Laxman Naskar judgment relevant in this case. The Supreme Court, if it takes up the issue of remission in the Bilkis case, should also examine whether the State had been guided by the opinion of the presiding officer of the sentencing court on the remission applications. In Union of India Vs. Sriharan @ Murugan, the apex court said the presiding judgeâs opinion would shed light on factors like the nature of the crime that was committed, the record of the convicts, their backgrounds and other relevant factors, which would enable the government to take the ârightâ decision as to whether or not the sentence should be remitted. After all, as the Supreme Court observed in Nandini Sundar Vs. Chhattisgarh, it is the âresponsibility of the States to prevent untoward incidents and to prevent crimeâ. In its 2018 decision in the Tehseen Poonawalla case on mob violence and lynching, the court considered the âtargeted violence and commission of offences affecting the human body and against private and public property by mobs under the garb of self-assumed and self-appointed protectors of lawâ. Here, the court noted that âhorrendous acts of mobocracyâ should not become the ânew normalâ. The apex court had warned the State against turning âa deaf ear to the growing rumblings of its peopleâ. International academics urge Supreme Court to dismiss cases against Setalvad, Sreekumar Eleven international scholars have urged the Supreme Court to take suo motu notice of the fallout of the Zakia Jafri judgement, expunge the âderogatoryâ remarks contained in it, and to dismiss the cases against co-petitioner Teesta Setalvad and witness R.B. Sreekumar, who have been arrested âon the strength of these remarksâ. In June, Setalvad and Sreekumar were arrested by the Ahmedabad Crime Branch after a First Information Report (FIR) was registered against them for allegedly fabricating documents to frame innocent people in the 2002 Gujarat riots related cases. In a statement released by non-government organisation SAHMAT, the scholars said: âWe, the undersigned members of the academic community, are deeply disturbed by some of the recent judgments of the Indian Supreme Court, which have a direct bearing on the future of civil liberties and human rights in India. We wish to draw attention, in particular, to the judgment in the Zakia Jafri case, which raises three disturbing questions.â âFirst, since the petitioners had challenged the findings of the SIT report that gave a clean chit to the Gujarat government for the riots following the Godhra incident, and asked the Supreme Court to order an independent investigation, for the Court to dismiss their appeal on the basis of the very same impugned SIT report seems to us to be unjust,â it said. The letter said: âSecond, while dismissing their appeal, the Court has quite gratuitously and wholly unfairly attributed ulterior motives to the petitioners. This has even emboldened the executive to arrest co-petitioner Teesta Setalvad, along with witness R.B. Sreekumar, both of whom have also been denied bail. If any patient, prolonged, peaceful, and entirely legitimate pursuit of justice through the due process, is called âkeeping the pot boilingâ, then this remark, quite apart from being offensive, discourages people from approaching the Court on any matter relating to excesses or dereliction on the part of the executive.â âThird, the Court has passed these uncalled-for obiter dicta without even giving a hearing to those against whom these remarks are directed; this sets an unfortunate precedent in jurisprudence,â it said. Stating that apart from the Emergency period, the Indian Supreme Court had generally played an honourable role in defending the democratic commitments of the country, the scholars said âwhich is why we are dismayed by the recent tendency discernible in the Zakia Jafri judgmentâ. According to the statement, its signatories are Bhiku Parekh, House of Lords (London); Noam Chomsky, Prof. Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Prof., University of Arizona (U.S.); Prof. Arjun Appadurai of Max Planck Institute (Germany); Prof. Wendy Brown of Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton (U.S.); Prof. Emeritus Sheldon Pollock and Profs. Carol Rovane and Akeel Bilgrami of Columbia University (U.S.); Prof. Emeritus Charles Taylor of McGill University (Canada); Prof. Martha Nussbaum of University of Chicago (U.S.); and Profs. Robert Pollin and Gerald Epstein of University of Massachusetts (U.S.). Finnish PM Sanna Marin takes drugs test after party video goes viral Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said on Friday she had taken a drugs test in the wake of video footage published earlier this week that showed her partying with friends, and vowed she had never used illegal drugs. âI have today taken a drug test and the results will come within a week,â she told a news conference. âNever in my life have I used drugs.â Marin added that her ability to perform her duties remained unimpaired during the night in question and that she would have left the party had she been required to work. Video clips of Marin partying with well-known Finnish influencers and artists began circulating in social media this week and they were soon published by several media outlets in Finland and abroad. Marin had faced calls to do a drug test from politicians in her government coalition as well as from the opposition after the videos emerged. In Brief The Indian Council of Medical Research may conduct a sero-survey among contacts of monkeypox patients to check for the presence of antibodies and find out how many of them were asymptomatic, official sources said on August 19, 2022. As of now, it is not known what is the proportion of people who stay asymptomatic of the viral infection, they said. India so far has reported ten cases of monkeypox. âThe idea is to find out how many of them contracted the disease due to exposure to the infected and did not show symptoms,â a source said. Evening Wrap will return tomorrow [logo] The Evening Wrap 19 AUGUST 2022 [The Hindu logo] Welcome to the Evening Wrap newsletter, your guide to the day’s biggest stories with concise analysis from The Hindu. [[Arrow]Open in browser]( [[Mail icon]More newsletters]( Delhi Deputy CM Manish Sisodia among 15 named in CBI FIR in excise policy case The CBI, alleging irregularities in Delhiâs excise policy 2021-22, on Friday, [filed an FIR against 15 persons, including Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia]( as accused. Among the accused are then Excise Commissioner Arva Gopi Krishna, Deputy Commissioner Anand Tiwari, and Assistant Commissioner Pankaj Bhatnagar. [A CBI official during a search at the residence of Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia in New Delhi on August 19, 2022. ] The others include Vijay Nair, former chief executive officer of Only Much Louder, an entertainment and event management company (Mumbai); Manoj Rai, former employee of Pernod Richard, Amandeep Dhal, director of Brinco Sales Private Limited (Delhi); Sameer Mahendru, managing director of Indospirit Group; Amit Arora, director of Buddy Retail Private Limited (Delhi); Dinesh Arora; Mahadev Liquors; Sunny Marwah authorised signatory of Mahadev Liquors; Arun Ramchandra Pillai and Arjun Pandey. Earlier, the CBI searched 21 locations, including the premises of Sisodia, in connection with the alleged irregularities in the State governmentâs previous Excise Policy. The searches, in seven States and a Union Territory, were also carried out on the premises of the then Excise Commissioner Arava Gopi Krishna and two more public servants, according to a CBI official. Confirming that a CBI team had reached his residence, Sisodia through his Twitter handle said he was disappointed that those doing good work in the country were being harassed. âThat is why our country could not become No.1,â he said. Sisodia, who holds the excise portfolio, said he would cooperate in the probe in order to find the truth, which would be established in court. He said that nothing incriminating had been found against him so far. Stating that earlier the then Health Minister Satyendar Jain was arrested and now he was being targeted, Sisodia alleged the action was being taken to stop the good work being done in the areas of education and health in Delhi. Last month, Delhi Lieutenant-Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena had recommended a CBI probe into the revamped Excise Policy. According to an assessment report, the Delhi Excise Policy 2021-22 involved alleged violations and procedural lapses. It was suspected that the policy led to a loss of over â¹150 crore to the exchequer. Recently, Lieutenant-Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena suspended 11 officials, including the then Excise Commissioner and Deputy Excise Commissioner Anand Kumar Tiwari, in the same matter. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had then dismissed the allegations, stating that Sisodia was being targeted without any basis. Reacting to Fridayâs developments, Kejriwal said the CBI raid at his junior colleagueâs house was the result of their good performance which is being appreciated globally. âThe day Delhiâs Education model was appreciated and Manish Sisodiaâs photo appeared on the front page of New York Times, the Centre sent CBI at the residence of Manish. âCBI is welcome. Will extend full cooperation. Earlier also there were raid and probe. Nothing came out. Nothing will come out now also,â Kejriwal tweeted. The Congress said the ârelentless misuseâ of agencies against political rivals erodes their credibility and gives an opportunity even for the corrupt to get away. Soon after CBI raids were conducted at the residence of Sisodia, Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera said the honest end up paying the price in such processes. âThe flip side to relentless misuse of agencies against political rivals is that even legitimate, rightful actions of agencies come under a cloud of suspicion. In the process, the corrupt get away hiding behind the âmisuseâ argument and the honest end up paying the price,â Khera said on Twitter. Describing Sisodia as the best Education Minister of Independent India, Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann said the CBI raid at the Delhi Deputy Chief Ministerâs residence was the reward for the Delhi governmentâs good performance being appreciated globally. âManish Sisodia is the best Education Minister of Independent India. Today the largest U.S. newspaper NYT printed his photo on the front page. And today Modi ji sent CBI to his house. How will India progress like this?â Mann said in a tweet in Hindi. Other Ministers in the Bhagwant Mann-led Aam Aadmi Party government in Punjab too attacked the BJP-led Centre after the CBI raid at Mr. Sisodiaâs house. âThe Day no. 1 Newspaper of the no. 1 country in the world recognises Delhi govtâs Education Model & @msisodia ji as best education minister ever. Same Morning CBI is sent to Manish jiâ house by Shameless BJP. It proves BJP doesnât want India to have perfect govt Schools,â Punjabâs Minister of School Education and Jails, Harjot Singh Bains, said in a tweet. Past judgments could aid Supreme Court to examine premature release of Bilkis Bano case convicts The Supreme Court has enough ammunition in the form of past judgments [to examine the Gujarat governmentâs premature release of 11 convicts]( who were sentenced to life imprisonment for the 2002 Bilkis Bano gangrape case. For one, on April 23, 2019, the court, while awarding her â¹50 lakh in compensation, described how the âbrutal, diabolic, gruesome, horrific acts of violenceâ committed on her has left an âindelible imprint on her mind which will continue to torment and cripple herâ. The apex court had noted that the then 21-year-old and pregnant Bilkis was ârepeatedly gangrapedâ. She was a âmute and helpless witness to her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter butchered to deathâ. She had lost all the members of her family while fleeing the mayhem and violence of the 2002 riots. The court said she had lived the life of a nomad, an orphan. The State governmentâs decision to remit the sentence of the 11 convicts has raised a furious public outcry. Civil rights groups have urged the Supreme Court to revoke the remission. Bilkisâs family has told the media that they are scared of what may happen to them in the future. It was as recently as in April 2022 that an apex court Bench led by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud had said that the state cannot exercise its remission powers arbitrarily. The court, in State of Haryana Vs. Mohinder Singh, has underscored that the grant of remission should be âinformed, fair and reasonableâ. In Rajan Vs. Home Secretary, Department of Tamil Nadu, the top court has held that âgrant of premature release is not a matter of privilege but is the power coupled with duty conferred on the appropriate governmentâ. The court has said that âremission should not undermine the nature of crime committedâ. The court has, in Laxman Naskar Vs. Union of India, laid down five questions which should feature in the Stateâs mind before deciding on remission. They are â whether the offence is an individual act of crime that does not affect society; whether there is a chance of the crime being repeated in future; whether the convict has lost the potentiality to commit crime; whether any purpose is being served in keeping the convict in prison; and socio-economic conditions of the convictâs family. The fact that the crimes were committed on Bilkis in the background of violence which affected the entire State; the apprehensions voiced by her family following the release of the convicts, and the warm welcome reported to have been accorded to the 11 men when they came out of jail, make the Laxman Naskar judgment relevant in this case. The Supreme Court, if it takes up the issue of remission in the Bilkis case, should also examine whether the State had been guided by the opinion of the presiding officer of the sentencing court on the remission applications. In Union of India Vs. Sriharan @ Murugan , the apex court said the presiding judgeâs opinion would shed light on factors like the nature of the crime that was committed, the record of the convicts, their backgrounds and other relevant factors, which would enable the government to take the ârightâ decision as to whether or not the sentence should be remitted. After all, as the Supreme Court observed in Nandini Sundar Vs. Chhattisgarh, it is the âresponsibility of the States to prevent untoward incidents and to prevent crimeâ. In its 2018 decision in the Tehseen Poonawalla case on mob violence and lynching, the court considered the âtargeted violence and commission of offences affecting the human body and against private and public property by mobs under the garb of self-assumed and self-appointed protectors of lawâ. Here, the court noted that âhorrendous acts of mobocracyâ should not become the ânew normalâ. The apex court had warned the State against turning âa deaf ear to the growing rumblings of its peopleâ. International academics urge Supreme Court to dismiss cases against Setalvad, Sreekumar [Eleven international scholars have urged the Supreme Court]( to take suo motu notice of the fallout of the Zakia Jafri judgement, expunge the âderogatoryâ remarks contained in it, and to dismiss the cases against co-petitioner Teesta Setalvad and witness R.B. Sreekumar, who have been arrested âon the strength of these remarksâ. In June, Setalvad and Sreekumar were arrested by the Ahmedabad Crime Branch after a First Information Report (FIR) was registered against them for allegedly fabricating documents to frame innocent people in the 2002 Gujarat riots related cases. In a statement released by non-government organisation SAHMAT, the scholars said: âWe, the undersigned members of the academic community, are deeply disturbed by some of the recent judgments of the Indian Supreme Court, which have a direct bearing on the future of civil liberties and human rights in India. We wish to draw attention, in particular, to the judgment in the Zakia Jafri case, which raises three disturbing questions.â âFirst, since the petitioners had challenged the findings of the SIT report that gave a clean chit to the Gujarat government for the riots following the Godhra incident, and asked the Supreme Court to order an independent investigation, for the Court to dismiss their appeal on the basis of the very same impugned SIT report seems to us to be unjust,â it said. The letter said: âSecond, while dismissing their appeal, the Court has quite gratuitously and wholly unfairly attributed ulterior motives to the petitioners. This has even emboldened the executive to arrest co-petitioner Teesta Setalvad, along with witness R.B. Sreekumar, both of whom have also been denied bail. If any patient, prolonged, peaceful, and entirely legitimate pursuit of justice through the due process, is called âkeeping the pot boilingâ, then this remark, quite apart from being offensive, discourages people from approaching the Court on any matter relating to excesses or dereliction on the part of the executive.â âThird, the Court has passed these uncalled-for obiter dicta without even giving a hearing to those against whom these remarks are directed; this sets an unfortunate precedent in jurisprudence,â it said. Stating that apart from the Emergency period, the Indian Supreme Court had generally played an honourable role in defending the democratic commitments of the country, the scholars said âwhich is why we are dismayed by the recent tendency discernible in the Zakia Jafri judgmentâ. According to the statement, its signatories are Bhiku Parekh, House of Lords (London); Noam Chomsky, Prof. Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Prof., University of Arizona (U.S.); Prof. Arjun Appadurai of Max Planck Institute (Germany); Prof. Wendy Brown of Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton (U.S.); Prof. Emeritus Sheldon Pollock and Profs. Carol Rovane and Akeel Bilgrami of Columbia University (U.S.); Prof. Emeritus Charles Taylor of McGill University (Canada); Prof. Martha Nussbaum of University of Chicago (U.S.); and Profs. Robert Pollin and Gerald Epstein of University of Massachusetts (U.S.). Finnish PM Sanna Marin takes drugs test after party video goes viral [Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said on Friday she had taken a drugs test]( in the wake of video footage published earlier this week that showed her partying with friends, and vowed she had never used illegal drugs. âI have today taken a drug test and the results will come within a week,â she told a news conference. âNever in my life have I used drugs.â [Prime minister of Finland Sanna Marin holds a press conference in Helsinki on August 19, 2022. ] Marin added that her ability to perform her duties remained unimpaired during the night in question and that she would have left the party had she been required to work. Video clips of Marin partying with well-known Finnish influencers and artists began circulating in social media this week and they were soon published by several media outlets in Finland and abroad. Marin had faced calls to do a drug test from politicians in her government coalition as well as from the opposition after the videos emerged. In Brief The [Indian Council of Medical Research may conduct a sero-survey among contacts of monkeypox patients]( to check for the presence of antibodies and find out how many of them were asymptomatic, official sources said on August 19, 2022. As of now, it is not known what is the proportion of people who stay asymptomatic of the viral infection, they said. India so far has reported ten cases of monkeypox. âThe idea is to find out how many of them contracted the disease due to exposure to the infected and did not show symptoms,â a source said. Evening Wrap will return tomorrow  Todayâs Top Picks [[Doesnât take much effort to form government but hard work needed to build country: PM Modi] Doesnât take much effort to form government but hard work needed to build country: PM Modi](
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