SC adjourns hearing as Shaheen Bagh mediators file report

The Supreme Court on Monday adjourned till Wednesday the hearing of pleas against the ongoing protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA, at New Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh.

Earlier in the day, the interlocutors appointed by the apex court, senior advocates Sanjay Hegde and Sadhana Ramachandran, who were tasked to convince the protesters to change the venue of their agitation, submitted their report in a sealed cover to the top court.

Hundreds of people have been on a sit-in demonstration along a stretch in south Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh to protest the contentious CAA for more than two months. This has led to frequent traffic snarls.

Two petitions have been filed on this matter. Advocate and activist Amit Sahni had filed a plea in the Supreme Court against Shaheen Bagh protesters, claiming that the sit-in disrupted daily life in the area. “No one can be permitted to occupy a public road for any reason whatsoever and that too for an indefinite period to make others suffer for this,” the plea contended.

Former Bharatiya Janata Party member of the legislative assembly, Nand Kishore Garg, also filed a plea in the apex court seeking directions to authorities to remove protestors from the area.

However, former chief information commissioner Wajahat Habibullah, through an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court, told the court that the protests at Shaheen Bagh were peaceful and the inconvenience caused to commuters was because of the barricades “unnecessarily” put up by the Delhi Police far away from the site.

The women-led epicentre of protests against CAA has drawn global attention. The flip side is that thousands of commuters are facing inconvenience and their daily life is getting affected because of the traffic jams caused by the roadblocks.