A Delhi court on Tuesday ordered the police in the national capital to file a first information report against Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal for allegedly misusing public money to put up hoardings in the capital’s Dwarka area, PTI reported.
Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Neha Mittal of the Rouse Avenue Court directed the concerned police station to file the FIR under Section 3 of the 2007 Delhi Prevention of Defacement of Property Act and for “any other offence that appear to have been committed from the facts of the case”.
Section 3 of the Act deals with the penalty for the defacement of public property.
The application was filed in 2019 by Shiv Kumar Saxena, who alleged that Kejriwal, former Matiala MLA Gulab Singh and then Dwarka A Ward Councillor Nitika Sharma “deliberately misused public money by putting up large-sized hoardings” at several places in the area.
In 2022, a status report by the station house officer at the Dwarka South Police Station noted that Saxena had filed his complaint three years earlier, The Indian Express reported. No such hoardings were found at the alleged spot at the time of the filing of the report, therefore, no cognisable offence was made out, it added.
On September 15, 2022, a magistrate court in Dwarka dismissed the application filed by Saxena seeking an FIR in the matter, according to the newspaper. Subsequently, he filed a revision petition.
On January 21, the revisionist court remanded the matter back to the magistrate court after directing it to take a decision on the application again.
“This court does not find any merit in the arguments advanced by Ld. APP [additional public prosecutor” for the state that it is impossible to collect any evidence at this stage due to lapse of time and non-availability of any particulars of the printing press,” The Indian Express quoted Mittal as saying in her order on Tuesday.
The delay also occurred because the police had not filed a report of its action in the case on several dates despite repeated orders from the court, she added.
Design & Developed by Yes Mom Hosting
