CHENNAI: Former city police commissioner K Radhakrishnan, on Tuesday, justified police action at the Madras High Court premises during the advocates-police clash on February 19 this year.
In his counter affidavit to a batch of writ petitions from lawyers and their respective organisations seeking the suspension or removal of the top police officials involved in the clashes, he said, “The situation and circumstances were of a nature that warranted the police to resort to lathi charge, but for which, the life and safety of the public and the policemen would have been in peril. The police, therefore, left with no other option but to use the required minimum force to maintain law and order and to disperse the unlawful assembly of the advocates.”
“If I had not spent adequate time on counselling those restless policemen, who had sustained injuries at the stone-throwing of the unruly advocates and calming them down, there would have been a collapse of the morale of the policemen leading to a flash strike plunging the whole city in chaos and confusion. The tension inside the High Court campus was fast degenerating into a major law and order situation and spreading into the nerve centres of Chennai and the down town areas.”
He said that it was incorrect to allege that the police had deliberately violated the human rights of the advocates and others by assaulting and abusing them, and that the modesty of the women advocates was outraged.
He also denied that there were any simmering tensions between police and lawyers, simply because the State police had registered 110 cases against the lawyers from 2001-2008.
In his counter, DGP KP Jain reflected Radakrishnan’s views that it was the advocates who had invited the problem by organising themselves in an unlawful assembly, indulging in stone-throwing, abusing verbally and attacking the police personnel and setting afire to the police station inside the High Court premises, which forced the police authorities to take action.
In his counter, the present city police commissioner T Rajendran, who was then the Additional DGP (L&O) submitted that he was not a party to the incidents that occurred on February 19.
D Jothi Jagarajan, secretary, public and rehabilitation department holding additional charge of home secretary placed on record that any police personnel if found to be the cause for the excess, would be suitably punished based on the report of the Sundaradevan commission.