Gujarat: Cong MLA Jignesh Mevani, 18 Others Sentenced To 6-Month Jail In 2016 Protest Case
Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate P N Goswami, who also imposed a fine on Mevani and others, suspended their sentence till October 17 to enable them file to appeals.
New Delhi: A court in Ahmedabad sentenced Gujarat Congress's working president and MLA Jignesh Mevani and 18 others to six months' simple imprisonment on Friday in connection to a case of rioting in 2016, news agency PTI reported.
According to the report, Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate P N Goswami, who also imposed a fine on Mevani and others, suspended their sentence till October 17 to enable them file to appeals.
Notably, the case is related to a road blockade protest staged by Mevani and his associates.
It is to be noted that the riot case was registered against Mevani and 19 others at the University police station in 2016 for staging road blockade.
They had staged the agitation to press their demand that an under-construction building of the law department of Gujarat University be named after Dr B R Ambedkar.
The First Information Report (FIR) was registered under Indian Penal Code Sections 143 (unlawful assembly) and 147 (rioting) as well as sections of the Gujarat Police Act.
As per reports, one of the accused died during the pendency of the case.
Notably, Jignesh Mevani, a prominent Dalit leader, won the 2017 Gujarat election as an independent with the support of Congress. The party later made him a working president of its state unit.
Earlier in May, a magisterial court in Gujarat’s Mehsana had convicted Mevani and nine others in a five-year-old case of holding an ‘Azadi march’ without permission and sentenced them to three months’ imprisonment.
Giving the verdict, Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate JA Parmar had held Mevani and nine others, including NCP functionary Reshma Patel and some members of Mevani’s Rashtriya Dalit Adhikar Manch, guilty of being part of an unlawful assembly in July 2017, under IPC Section 143. The court had also imposed a fine of Rs 1,000 each on all the 10 convicts.
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