Shivraj Chouhan Asks Judge To Forgive ABVP Men Who Snatched Car. Here's Why

Former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Friday wrote to state Chief Justice Ravi Malimath seeking forgiveness for two ABVP functionaries who were arrested for taking the car of a judge to ferry an ailing person to a hospital in Gwalior.

The AVP's Gwalior secretary Himanshu Shrotriya (22) and deputy secretary Sukrit Sharma (24) were arrested on Monday under the MP Dakaiti Aur Vyapharan Prabhavit Kshetra Adhiniyam (MPDVPK Act), an anti-dacoity law, after they snatched the car's key from its driver at Gwalior railway station and took Ranjeet Singh, VC of a private university in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, to hospital.

Their bail was rejected on Wednesday and they are in judicial custody at present.

"As it is a different sort of crime committed for a holy cause and done on humanitarian ground for saving life, it is worth forgiving. The intention of Himanshu Shrotriya (22) and Sukrit Sharma (24) was not to commit crime. So keeping in view their future they should be forgiven," Chouhan wrote in the letter to Justice Malimath.

While denying them bail, the special judge for dacoity cases Sanjay Goyal had observed that one seeks help with politeness and not with force.

The judge, citing the police diary in the incident, said an ambulance, which is the ideal vehicle for such purposes, had arrived to ferry the ailing man.

Earlier, speaking on the issue, Sandeep Vaishnav, the ABVP's MP unit secretary, had defended the duo saying they were trying to help a man whose health condition was deteriorating rapidly and that they did not know the car belonged to a high court judge.

As per Gwalior's Inderganj City Superintendent of Police Ashok Jadon, Ranjeet Singh (68), who was the vice-chancellor of a private university in Uttar Pradesh's Jhansi, died of cardiac failure according to a preliminary post-mortem report. 

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