Petition in Supreme Court against Gurugram mahapanchayat's call for economic boycott

New Delhi, August 8

Two days after a Gurugram mahapanchayat gave a call for the economic boycott of Muslims, a petition filed in the Supreme Court (SC) on Tuesday sought the court’s intervention in the matter.

Senior counsel Kapil Sibal mentioned the matter before a Constitution Bench, led by CJI DY Chandrachud, which is hearing petitions challenging the nullification of Article 370 of the Constitution.

“There is a very serious thing that has happened in Gurugram... There is a call to say that if you employ these people in shops, you will all be ‘gaddars’. This is creating problems... We have filed an urgent petition,” Sibal told the Bench just before the lunch break.

“Your Lordship may look at lunchtime,” Sibal said. Hundreds of residents of Gurugram villages gathered at Tighara for the Hindu mahapanchayat on Sunday and called for an economic boycott of Muslims.

The mahapanchayat – which was called to oppose the police crackdown on village youths for communal violence in Gurugram, including the torching of a mosque and the murder of an Imam – ended up giving a call for the boycott of Muslim shops and denying them houses and shops on rent.

It had even demanded the dissolution of Nuh as a district and division of its villages into districts of Gurugram, Faridabad, Palwal and Rewari. They said the district should be handed over to Uttar Pradesh, as they claimed Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath would “set them right”.

The mahapanchayat also gave a week’s ultimatum to the police to release all those arrested, failing which they threatened to bring Gurugram to a halt.

Accusing the Gurugram police of witch-hunting, residents of Tighra village claimed that the police tried to cover up their Intelligence and action failure by making hasty bulk arrests without investigation.

“In Nuh, they could not identify the rioters for days and here within an hour of the incident, they had names and addresses of our boys,” they said.

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