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The Supreme Court asked the Haryana government to identify the persons and organisation responsible for holding demonstration in December 2010 against the booking of some upper caste people in connection with the Mirchpur Dalit killings case.
A bench of justices G S Singhvi and A K Ganguly also directed the government and the Railway Board to spell out the steps taken by them to recover financial loss caused following the 11-day stir organised by 12 'khap' panchayats.
"Who are the persons behind it? You must tell us the names of the persons and the party who were behind all these agitations. There must have been some kind of political backing behind it," the bench said while granting two weeks' time to reply.
Not impressed by the response of the state government that cases have been filed, the court said, "Forget about cases. We know what happens after a case is registered. The state must tell us who is responsible for this (agitation)."
The villagers had been protesting the booking of 98 members of their community in the case relating to the killing of 70-year-old Tara Chand and his physically challenged teenaged daughter Suman at Mirchpur village in Hisar on April 21, 2010.
Demanding a fresh probe into the Dalit killings, upper caste people of Mirchpur and other adjoining villages in Hisar district had brought the rail and road traffic to Delhi via Jind to a grinding halt.
On the last hearing the state government had informed the court that loss of Rs 45.92 lakh was caused to the transport department due to agitation and Rs 90,000 were spent by the forest department in removing 3,130 trees which were uprooted by the protesters.
Members of the pre-dominant Jat community squatted on the railway tracks at Julani village near Jind railway station in December 2010, disrupting railway traffic on the Jind-Jakhal section of the Delhi-Ferozepur route.
The protesters had also been blocking road traffic in Jind and other places of the state, besides locking up the Haryana roadways bus depot in many places. Normalcy was restored in the troubled districts on January 26 following talks between leaders of the protesters and Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda in Kaithal.
Hooda had assured Bhag Singh Jalabh, convener of the 41-member committee constituted by Sarvjatiya Sarvkhap Mahapanchayat, to look into Jalabh's grievances that many people had been falsely implicated in the case.
A Delhi court had directed the Haryana government to move all the 98 accused from Hisar jail to Tihar prison since their trial was transferred to a court in Delhi following a Supreme Court order.
The protestors had been demanding that the probe be held by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) either at Rohtak or Hisar and the accused be lodged in either of the two jails.