Demanding Wages Is Not a Crime: How a Gurugram Judge Unravelled the Manesar 'Conspiracy' |
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In a cluster of orders that read as one sustained argument, a Gurugram sessions court has taken apart the prosecution’s theory in the Manesar labour unrest. Demanding higher wages, the judge held, is no offence.
Additional Sessions Judge Dr Gagan Geet Kaur freed the union leader Ajit Singh on May 18. On May 30 she granted bail to three more men accused in the same case: Vivek Kumar, Raj Kumar and Shyambir.
The grants are individually unremarkable. But read as a sequence, they amount to a finding that the case against the protesters was, at its core, a case against protest.
The matter arises from the violence of April 9 at Richa Global Exports, a textile unit in the Industrial Model Township at Manesar. On the complaint of its human resources head, police booked unnamed rioters for attempt to murder, rioting, arson, criminal conspiracy and damage to public property, under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act, 1984. A mob of 200 to 250 workers, the police alleged, pelted managerial staff and officers with stones, set company and government vehicles ablaze, and beat two women employees.
A bail court, however, questions whether the State has shown, even prima facie, that the particular accused before it did these things. On that question, the case unravelled in open court.
The public prosecutor conceded that Ajit Singh was not at the site on the day of the violence. The State’s residual theory was incitement, that he had inflamed the workers beforehand through a WhatsApp group and public speeches. Yet, he neither worked at Richa Global nor belonged to its workers’ group. He is general secretary of the union at Bellsonica, a separate auto-components plant, an affiliation that placed him outside the very group the police said had hatched the plot.
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