By IANS
Bhopal : The opposition Congress in Madhya Pradesh has said the Supreme Court’s verdict to transfer the trial in the killing of professor H.S. Sabharwal from Madhya Pradesh to Maharashtra proved people were losing faith in the government.
“It was a proof that the people had lost their faith in the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government,” Leader of the Opposition Jamuna Devi said.
“We will take the issue of the professor’s murder to the court of the people too,” she said while speaking to reporters outside the assembly here late Wednesday.
However, the ruling BJP has said the verdict to transfer was not against the government.
BJP spokesman Uma Shankar Gupta said: “The Supreme Court judgement is only about the shifting of the venue. It is not a verdict against the government.”
Reacting to the order Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said: “The order of the apex court will be respected.”
The Supreme Court Wednesday transferred the trial from Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh to Nagpur in Maharashtra, with a direction for its completion within two months.
The order came on a petition by the son of the slain Ujjain professor, Himanshu Sabharwal, who apprehended that a free and fair trial was not possible in Madhya Pradesh. Around 50 witnesses had turned hostile during the trial.
A teacher at Ujjain’s Madhav Government Inter College, 61-year-old Sabharwal was assaulted, allegedly by activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the youth wing of the state’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), on Aug 28, 2006, and died immediately afterwards.
The professor had invalidated a students’ union election, leading to the protests from the ABVP that turned ugly.
Besides Sabharwal’s family, the Congress here too had been demanding transfer of the case outside the state.
The demand to shift the case outside the state was intensified particularly after the chief minister met one of the accused Vimal Tomar in an Indore hospital this January. The Congress had then demanded the resignation of the chief minister.
However, Chouhan did not see anything wrong in the meeting, saying he had visited hospital for an inspection and his meeting with Tomar fell in the same category as his meeting with other patients.