‘Now when it suits him…’: Sushil Modi targets Nitish Kumar on jail manual tweak

PATNA: Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sushil Kumar Modi has countered Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar who played down the decision to tweak the Bihar prison manual that led to the release of former Bihar lawmaker Anand Mohan on April 27.

Nitish Kumar last week responded to criticism over the state government order on April 10 removing “murder of a public servant on duty” from the list of offences for which remission of jail term cannot be considered. The change helped Anand Mohan, a former Lok Sabha MP and Rajput leader with considerable influence on his caste voters, walk out of prison on Saturday. Mohan was awarded life imprisonment for the murder of a young Dalit Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer in 1994.

Kumar told reporters on Friday that the central guidelines issued in 2016 did not have a clause differentiating between the murder of a common man and a government servant. “Bihar had such a clause and we removed it. Is there a need for such a distinction?... It is not a political thing,” the Janata Dal (United) leader said.

Sushil Kumar Modi delivered his point-by-point rebuttal to Nitish Kumar on Sunday evening, saying it was strange that Nitish Kumar issued a prison manual that was much more stringent than the one issued by the central government in 2016. “And now when it suits him, he was using the central jail manual as a cover,” Modi said.

Modi asked if the state was also going to scrap section 353 of the Indian Penal Code which deals with assault to stop public servants from discharging their duty for parity between officials and the common people.

“This applies to public servants but not others. Will this distinction be also removed?” Modi asked rhetorically.

The Rajya Sabha MP said the state government’s move has paved the way for the release of 27 gangsters.

Uma Krishnaiah, the wife of G Krishnaiah, the then Gopalganj district magistrate who was killed in 1994 by a mob led by Anand Mohan, has petitioned the Supreme Court against the April 10 amendment and the release of the former MP on the ground that “sentence of imprisonment for life given to a convict as a substitute for the death sentence must be viewed differently and segregated from the ordinary life imprisonment given as the sentence of first choice.”

A bench headed by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud agreed to list the petition on May 8 after lawyer Tanya Shree, appearing for Uma Krishnaiah, mentioned the case.

Tanya Shree earlier told HT that the decision of the state government has been assailed on the ground that it goes contrary to Supreme Court decisions, which lays down that life sentence means the convict’s biological life and that states cannot mechanically release any prisoner at their whims and fancies after 14 years.”