Madras High Court dismisses plea to restrain police from detaining Amar Prasad of BJP under Goondas Act

Justice G. Jayachandran dismissed the petition as premature after recording the statement of State Public Prosecutor (SPP) Hasan Mohamed Jinnah that as of now the Tambaram police had no proposal to detain the petitioner’s husband under any preventive detention law.

The Madras High Court on Wednesday dismissed a writ petition filed by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member S. Amar Prasad’s wife to restrain the Tambaram Commissioner of Police from invoking the Goondas Act against her husband who had been arrested in multliple criminal cases.

Justice G. Jayachandran dismissed the petition as premature after recording the statement of State Public Prosecutor (SPP) Hasan Mohamed Jinnah that as of now the Tambaram police had no proposal to detain the petitioner’s husband under any preventive detention law.

The SPP also told the court that the writ petition was not maintainable at all since a litigant could not seek an order preventing the police officials from exercising their powers in accordance with law. He also cited a few Supreme Court as well as the High Court judgements on the issue.

In her affidavit, the petitioner A. Nirosa said, her husband was at present serving as the State president of BJP’s youth development and sports cell. Earlier, he was advisor to Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare. He was also an expert in cyber security.

Stating that he had undertaken various projects in collaboration with the Centre to reduce cybercrime, she said, he had received the ‘Effulgent Star of the Decade’ award from Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2016. However, the Kanathur police recently registered a rioting case against him.

Claiming that it was a false case registered on charges of preventing government servants from performing their duty and damaging public property, when the police attempted to remove a BJP flag post outside State president K. Annamalai’s residence, she said, he was not present at all at the scene of crime.

“The video footage records of the incident evidentially proves that my husband was not at all present at the scene of occurrence during the alleged event,” she said and accused the police of taking revenge against her husband because he was a whistle-blower in the fake passport scam case.