The Bharatiya Janata Party governments in Maharashtra and West Bengal on Tuesday stopped coercive action against protesters who demonstrated against alleged irregularities in public exams last week, The Indian Express reported.

In Maharashtra, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who is also the state’s home minister, ordered the authorities to withdraw first information reports against protesters, the newspaper reported.

Twenty FIRs were registered in Mumbai in which more than 1,000 persons had been booked.

In West Bengal, the BJP government said it would not take coercive action against students. However, it cited an order passed by the Supreme Court on Tuesday to state that the cases against persons with criminal antecedents would not be dropped, The Indian Express reported.

The authorities were quoted as saying that as of Sunday evening, one case had been registered based on a complaint filed by the police in connection with the protests against paper leaks.

Sixteen persons had been arrested in the matter. All of them had been granted bail by the chief metropolitan magistrate’s court on Tuesday, The New Indian Express reported.

Six other cases had been registered on complaints by journalists who alleged that they had been assaulted during the protest on Friday.

On Monday, the BJP governments in Assam and Bihar said that they will release protesters who were detained or arrested during the agitation against alleged irregularities in public exams last week. The states said that they will also withdraw cases that had been filed against the demonstrators.

The agitation in Delhi started on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign began a protest at Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union education minister at the time, over the alleged irregularities in the conduct of competitive exams. Solidarity protests were held in several states. Pradhan resigned on Saturday.

The BJP-ruled states began ceasing coercive action after the Cockroach Janta Party on Monday remarked that there had been a “complete breach” of its agreement with the Union government with respect to its promise that no police action would be taken against peaceful protesters.

Cockroach Janta Party spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka had said that all cases filed against protesters must be withdrawn and all those who have been taken into custody must be released, “failing which we will be forced to sit on protest again”.

Court directive ‘wholly unacceptable’, says CJP

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court allowed the authorities in Delhi and other states to proceed with investigations in cases that have been registered in connection with the protests.

However, it directed that no coercive action should be taken against protesting students and that minors who had been detained should be released, as long as they did not have any “criminal antecedents”.

The Cockroach Janta Party said that the Supreme Court’s directive was “wholly unacceptable” and described it as “uninformed”.

The campaign’s spokesperson Saurav Das said that the group has a “credible apprehension” that the Union government and BJP-ruled states may “seek to use and weaponise” the order to continue filing and investigating FIRs against individual protesters and “subject them to great harassment”.

The Supreme Court “cannot be politicised for government’s gains”, Das said on social media on Tuesday. “Its orders cannot be weaponised to achieve those gains,” he added.

The Cockroach Janta Party said that the government had given a guarantee to the nation that needs to be honoured.

Das added: “All FIRs ought to be withdrawn. If criminals roamed, police must apply for cancellation of bail in their old cases. Must also answer why they were roaming so freely in society. But the government can’t use this excuse to pursue FIRs so it can later target genuine protesters. If given this leeway, the government will, of course, use it.”

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

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