The Supreme Court on Monday, 15 November, said it would confirm which retired judge would be appointed to monitor the investigation of the Lakhimpur Kheri incident on Wednesday, after speaking to potential candidates including Rakesh Jain.
"We need to find out some judge who is willing to take up the task," said Chief Justice of India NV Ramana.
Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for the state of Uttar Pradesh, said that they were happy for the court to appoint any retired judge, even someone who wasn't from UP – the bench had earlier only been considering retired judges from the state.
The bench also expressed concerns about the composition of the task force appointed to probe the incident, which saw four protesting farmers and a journalist plowed down by the car of a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, followed by retaliatory violence in which three BJP workers died.
The judges were concerned that the task force only had officers from Lakhimpur Kheri itself and no senior officers "from higher up". Salve assured the court that some senior officers had now been brought in.
The court was also informed by counsel for some petitioners that the chief of the Special Investigating Team had allegedly been transferred without the permission of the court, a matter it said it would take up at then next hearing.
The bench asked Salve about claims from some victims and their families that they hadn't received the promised compensation. He said their claims would be processed immediately if provided to the UP government standing counsel, senior advocate Garima Prashad.
Investigation Not Going the Way We Expected: SC
At the previous hearing on 8 November, the bench had expressed concerns once again about the investigation, and suggested that a retired judge should be appointed to monitor it.
The investigation is not going the way it expected, the judges said, expressing dissatisfaction at the fact that the forensic lab reports regarding the video evidence had not yet arrived and that the phone of only one accused had been seized so far.
The court also expressed its dissatisfaction with the status report which had been filed by the state of UP, which said nothing beyond the fact that more witnesses had been examined.
The bench also expressed concerns about the case against the main accused in the attack on farmers being mixed up with the mob lynching case.
The court stated that the investigation into both the cases must be kept apart, adding that the statements of witnesses pertaining to different cases must be recorded separately.
"What we expect from SIT is those coming to depose in the case of farmers death, this will be an independent exercise and the evidence you are collecting in the other case cannot be used in this," Justice Kant remarked, according to Bar & Bench.
"What it appears to us is that this SIT is unable to maintain an investigative distance between the three FIRs," he went on to say, the report added.
In order to ensure that there is no overlapping of the evidence, the court said it was proposing the appointment of a retired judge from the Punjab and Haryana High Court to oversee the investigation, LiveLaw reported.
"We want a retired HC judge to monitor the probe and filing of separate charge sheets. We want to protect the evidence collected," said a bench led by CJI NV Ramana.
The court suggested that Justice Rakesh Kumar Jain (Retd) or Justice Ranjit Singh (Retd) from Punjab and Haryana High Court could oversee the Lakhimpur Kheri investigation.
The judges had made strong observations about the investigation at previous hearings on 20 and 26 October as well. On 8 October, the bench had also taken strong exception to the fact that main accused Ashish Misra had been sent a summons so late and not been arrested.
(With inputs from LiveLaw and Bar & Bench)
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