 I will just give a very brief summary of facts, which many of you are familiar with. We do know that on 28th of August, there was a swoop by the Maharashtra police in many parts of the country, Delhi, Faridabad, Bombay, Thane, Pune, Ranchi, Hyderabad. These were done on very well-known prominent human rights activists, lawyers, writers, poets. Five of them were also arrested and immediately high courts were approached, the Delhi High Court and the Chandigarh High Court for two of them immediately granted that they should not be taken to Pune. On that basis, they were kept in house arrest. The very next day, on behalf of these four and five petitioners, a writ petition was moved in the Supreme Court. I also want to point out here that appearing on behalf of these five petitioners, actually there were many senior councils who voluntarily came forward and stood there with us to express solidarity and they wanted to be seen as agreeing with what the petition put forward. One of the earliest things that was objected to, and perhaps the petitioners would say something about that, is that they are strangers to this case. There are five accused. The five accused can approach the court, why are they speaking on their behalf? And perhaps they can refer to that that why did they come forward, what was the larger issue? I will quickly just trace the facts. The Supreme Court further confirmed the house arrest and that house arrest has actually today one month of over a month of that house arrest is over today's 28th of September. During that period, the proceedings have gone on in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court bench headed by the Chief Justice of India has heard the case at length. Today the judgment was given and in the judgment as we know there is a majority judgment that has declined our request for an SIT, a special investigating team or a court monitored investigation and there is a dissenting minority judgment of Justice Chandrachur, which has actually upheld our concerns, our issues, our contentions that there is malified in the investigation, that this investigation cannot be trusted, that liberty is at stake and therefore what we are seeking is a SIT that SIT he said should be constituted. I will go into the details of the judgment a little later after the petitioners have spoken. The house arrest has however continued by the majority judgment for four weeks. The petition continues for all the arrestees in August and they are not to be taken into by the Pune police and they have been given liberty to move the appropriate court and seek further remedies for themselves and I think that underlines perhaps what was at the heart of the petition that this is an extraordinary situation which requires the intervention of the Supreme Court in a fundamental right petition. I will now request Ramila Thapar to please say what she thinks and why they were, why they moved this petition in the first place. We, the petitioners, approached the Supreme Court when five well-known lawyers, journalists and civil rights activists were arrested across the country on the 28th of August and charged with abetting acts of terror under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. Our intention was to draw the attention of the judiciary to what we believe is a case of gross misuse of the state's powers under the draconian control of the UAPA. Our history as a republic shows that if left unchecked, such misuse causes grave injustices and endangers the civil liberties of all Indians. Those arrested on the 28th of August have been accused of being implicated in acts of terrorism. However, we believe that there are two kinds of terrorism, both of which create fear and undermine the foundations of our democracy. One is the violent acts of those described as terrorists who plant bombs, instigate people to be violent, engineer riots and deliberately spread fear through their actions. And the second is the illegal or unjustified acts of state functionaries who, instead of pursuing the actual perpetrators of violence, misuse their powers to harass those who do not conform to the politics of their current masters. When the state uses anti-terror laws without adequate proof against persons known to be working for the rights of the weaker sections of society, it is also spreading a kind of terror. Arbitrary arrests on implausible charges like those of the 28th of August are a source of anxiety for us all. They mean that the police can walk into our homes and arrest us either without a warrant or a warrant written in a language we do not understand, and then accuse us of activities about which we know nothing. It has always been assumed that a genuine democracy will respect the constitutional and legal rights of every citizen, including the right to hold opinions different from or even in opposition to those of the government of the day. Since the arrests follow similar arrests made in June, the arrests of the 28th of August point to a continuing attempt to erode those rights. Our petition was essentially an appeal to the Supreme Court to check this erosion of rights and protect the liberty and dignity of human rights activists. We the petitioners are pleased to note that at least the liberty and dignity of the human rights activists has for the time being not been jeopardized and the Supreme Court has protected the same. I would like to point out that already the headlines are saying that this is somehow a great victory for some people and that there has been some kind of vindication to the police. I would like to say a couple of things that one of the most important parts of this whole judgment and what has been said by the Supreme Court is to look at what Justice Chandrachud has said. You will have to pay a lot of attention to this. Because in this, liberty, freedom, rights on arrest, everything has been said about this. We went to court as petitioners to highlight not only the issue with these five people and their arrests, but to highlight a pattern of police behavior and abuse of the U.S.P.A. which we see across the country. It was to staunch this that we approached the Supreme Court and Justice Chandrachud has recognized this in his dissenting judgment. He has seen an urgency to stopping this kind of thing and he has said clearly in his judgment that high judicial pronouncements are not enough. You have to actually set people at liberty and the court itself, even the majority judgment seems to have been concerned to protect the rights of these people because of the arrestees and they have signaled this by saying, by giving these arrestees that is it 30 days? Four weeks. Four weeks and saying that they must be left alone while the investigation goes on. I also have to say that the police have received no go ahead. They have not received a go ahead to arrest. They have received a go ahead to do their investigation in a legal way, not to harass or to make unnecessary incarceration. Ladies and gentlemen, arrest comes at the end of a viable process of investigation. It is not meant to be the first action on a phishing expedition. I must make that clear to you and you must make it clear to the public because this is a very wrong misconception. Just to recap, these arrests are being made in an FIR which is registered in Pune on 8th of January, 2018. It is FIR number 4 of 2018 and in that FIR, there is a local man who says I attended a program called Elgar Parishad. Elgar Parishad program was held on 31st December 2017, organized by two judges, a former justice of the Supreme Court of India, Justice Saval and a former judge of the Bombay High Court, Justice Korsay Patel. They organized a meeting where Dalits and others met and spoke and pledged and it is available these judges have repeatedly spoken to the media and said that we will, we pledge to uphold the constitution. This person says that at that program, I heard X, one man who said certain things. When we read that FIR, it became clear that Sudhir Gawile, who is a known Dalit activist poet, has read out Marathi translation of a poem taken from a play of breath called The Good Person of Seshwan and clearly we understand that when people are speaking in poetry, it is not, it cannot be taken literally. There is also another FIR, FIR number 2 of 2018 lodged by Anita Savale, a Dalit woman who along with her family, two little children, was going across January to pay her homage at the biggest thumb to commemorate the 200th year of the Bhima-Koregaon battle and she says in the FIR, she names Millimdegh Bote and Sambhaji Bireh. She says they incited the violence and because of them there was large scale violence and looting. Ate Bote was granted bail after one month, Sambhaji Bireh has never been arrested. Two reports, one of the deputy mayor of Pune, one former judge of Telangana High Court, both say that Millimdegh Bote and Sambhaji Bireh are behind this violence on 1st January, which is called the Bhima-Koregaon violence. The person who lodges the second FIR in which there is a rolling arrest being made says on his Facebook page, any of you can check it, he claims that Sambhaji Bireh is his Guruji in June arrest summit, in August rates an arrest summit or saying they are linked to Bhima-Koregaon. I will now read out parts of Justice Chandrachur's judgment. The intersection between criminal law and constitutional rights has led to the evolution of judicial precedent which originates in this court. Our recent decisions reiterate the value of individual dignity as essential to democratic life, but not the edicts in judicial pronouncements can have no meaning to a citizen unless the constitutional quest for human liberty translates into securing justice for individuals whose freedom is under threat in specific cases. The role of the court involves particularly sensitive balance between when the state seeks to curb freedom to investigate perceived charges involving offenses against the state. The studial interrogation involves the balancing of diverse and often conflicting values, the effective administration of criminal justice and impartial process of investigation and the liberty and reputation of the individual. The invocation of a jurisdiction under Article 32 in this case is founded on the grievance that a group of activists is sought to be persecuted for espousing the cause of the marginalized which is considered to be unpopular. Conscious as the court is of the public interest in the effective administration of criminal justice, it cannot be oblivious to the overriding constitutional concern to secure the dignity of the individual. The key to the balance between the two lies in the fair, independent and impartial investigation of crime. As a matter of principle, I am unable to agree with the views expressed by the Learning Chief Justice and my learning brother Justice Khan Wilker. I just pause here for a minute and say, what did we ask? What was our prayer? What did we ask in this case? Give us a better investigation. Give us a fair investigation. Give us an independent investigation. It was not a prayer of reputation that you cannot investigate us. That was not what was before the court. The right to a fair investigation has been held in innumerable cases by the Supreme Court to be part of the right to life. I look forward because he is now narrating the facts and then he actually speaks about each of the petitioners and who they are and what has been their contribution which you can see in the petition as to what has been their specific contribution to public life whether through academics or otherwise. Then he speaks of who are the persons who are arrested. He actually goes into the history of the Bima Korygaon contestation which is a historical contestation of an assertion of identity. He speaks about that and then I will come to the main reasoning that Justice Chandra Chul gives. He says but in the present case it is necessary for the court to bear in mind that recourse to its constitutional jurisdiction under Article 32 has been invoked not only by the petitioners but by the five individuals. The five have also put in their respective statements. The court as a constitutional adjudicator has been entrusted with the jurisdiction under Article 32 to secure the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. While the discipline of the law of criminal procedure must at all times be kept in view it cannot be again said that the protection of fundamental liberties is a subject so integral to democratic constitutional values that technicalities should not be allowed to override the cause of substantive justice. The court must undoubtedly thread the circumspection for if the dimes are seeking access to its jurisdiction the normal remedies under criminal law should not be displaced. Again as the court has repeatedly emphasized public interest litigation should not become a weapon for settling scores so he takes into account the concerns that law would have. However he says here we have kind citizens who have invoked the jurisdiction of this court in extra ordinary circumstances where they claim that a group of human rights activists have been targeted by the state police. Each of those five individuals have joined the proceedings. It goes on then further to hold why NSIT? It refers to various judgments which I won't obviously go into of various judgments where SITs have been constituted. I can only say this to you that even in the case where there was a murder of a family and they felt that the police was not doing an investigation properly the Supreme Court under Article 32 constituted NSIT. So it's not an unknown remedy to the Supreme Court. With this body of precedent on the subject the maintainability of a prayer for relief seeking that the investigation should either be monitored by this court or entrusted to an independent SIT under the directions of this court cannot be in doubt. I must and then he has very very castigating remarks to me make about the conduct of the Pune and Maharashtra police. I must at the outset dwell on the fairness of the manner in which the police have approached this investigation. On 29 August 2018 this court issued notice to the state of Maharashtra and others. Within a few hours of the conclusion of the court hearing a press conference was held in Pune by Shivadira Hordke the Joint Commissioner of Police proclaiming that the Pune police had more than sufficient evidence against the five individuals whose transit remand was state by this court while ordering them to be placed under house arrest. This is dispercerating behavior. The Joint Commissioner sought this oblique manner to respond to the interim order of this court by recourse to the electronic media. On 31st August 2018 a press conference was addressed by team of senior police officers headed by ADG law and order Maharashtra. During the course of the press conference letters was selectively flagged according to the petitioners they were leaked to the media the video of which the court has seen in our petition and has then talked about other programs where the police has come forward. On each June an alleged letter was released to the police by the police to the media a little before proceedings for remand before the competent court in the June arrest alleging that the arrested persons were brought in to attack the prime minister. On 4th July 2018 when the arrested persons were to be produced before a court in Pune a letter attributed to Sudha Bharatwaj was sensationally telecast on a television channel linking her with the unlawful activities of a certain group a serious grievance has been made about the fact that these letters have neither been placed before the court of law nor did they find mention in the transit remand applications moved before the CGM. These were our grievances which have been which have found mention in the judgment of the of Justice Chandrithu. I will come to the end of what he says while this court has observed let me go further down with three people and then ask questions. He then referenced to the Nambi Narayan Aikistro scientist case which was only recently decided by the Supreme Court recently on 14th September 2018 the learned Chief Justice speaking for the present bench of free judges handed down a verdict granting conversation of Rs. 50 lakhs to a space scientist who was found upon further investigation by CBI to have been wrongfully implicated and subjected to custodian interrogation. There was an allegation against him. The learned Chief Justice then uncourts what the Chief Justice said in that case The fact that the payment of compensation was ordered nearly 24 years after the wrongful arrest is a grim reminder about how tenuous liberty can be and of the difficulty in correcting wrongs occasioned by unlawful arrest. There can be no manner of doubt that the deprivation of human rights seriously impinges upon the dignity of the individual for which even compensation may not constitute an adequate recompense. This court has a constitutional obligation where its attention has been drawn in a case such as the present to a real likelihood of the derailment of fair investigative process to issue appropriate directions under article 142 of the constitution. Hence, I am of the view that while the investigation should not be thwarted, this is a proper case for appointment of a special investigating team. Circumstances have been drawn to unnotice to cast a cloud on whether the Maharashtra police has in the present case acted as fair and impartial investigating agency. Sufficient material has been placed before the court, bearing on the need to have an independent investigation. Hence, following the line of precedent of this court which has been discussed earlier, I am firmly of the view that the special investigation team must be appointed. The investigation shall be monitored by this court. The special investigating team shall submit periodical status reports to this court, initially on a monthly basis. The interim orders passed by this court on 29th August 2018 shall continue to hold the field for a further period of three weeks within which it would be open to the set five individuals or anyone more of them to apply for bail before the court of competent jurisdiction. I would direct that the petition be listed after three days for orders of the constitution of the special investigating team. So clearly what we see here is that there is of course a fractured verdict and the dissenting judgment very clearly holds that there is a strong case made out for an SIT. The majority judgment does not agree with that view, but of course the majority judgment will hold. However as was pointed out earlier, even the majority judgment considers it a case where liberty should be protected, therefore four weeks have been given and they are free to exercise their legal rights and seek remedy from the appropriate court. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .