By IANS,
Hyderabad : A city court Friday directed the police to book a criminal case against the Srikrishna committee members for allegedly promoting enmity between different groups of people.
Additional metropolitan magistrate asked Panjagutta police to book the case against former Supreme Court judge B.N. Srikrishna and four other members. The police was asked to probe the allegations made in a petition filed by an advocate and report back to the court.
The five-member panel headed by Srikrishna was formed by the centre to go into the demand for and against separate statehood for the Telangana region.
The magistrate asked the police to register the case under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race), 478, 504 (insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace) and 505(2) (publishing or circulating statements of rumours).
Vali-ur-Rehman, the petitioner, alleged that the Srikrishna committee, in the secret chapter eighth of its report, tried to provoke people on the basis of their religion and region.
The other members of the committee are V.K. Duggal, former union home secretary, Ravinder Kaur, former professor at Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi), Abusaleh Sharif, senior research fellow of International Food Policy Research Institute at its New Delhi office and Ranbir Singh, vice chancellor of National Law University.
The panel submitted its report to the centre in December last year. It, however, did not make public eighth chapter of the report, dealing with the law and order problem in the event of formation of separate Telangana state.
The Andhra Pradesh High Court, while dealing with a petition, had last month directed the government to make the eighth chapter public.
The court took strong exception to certain contents of the chapter, which made some suggestions to the centre to suppress Telangana movement.
Pro-Telangana parties have been demanding prosecution of the committee members for hurting the sentiments of Telangana people.