New Delhi: Less than two months after the Supreme Court ordered the Uttar Pradesh government to fix accountability of individual officials for illegally demolishing the ancestral house senior journalist Manoj Tibrewal Akash, police in Maharajganj have registered a criminal case against 26 persons, including the then district magistrate and several police officers and administrative officials.
Along with Indian Administrative Services Officer Amar Nath Upadhyay, who was the district magistrate or DM of Maharajganj in September 2019 when Tibrewal’s house was arbitrarily demolished in the name of road widening, the 26 accused persons were slapped with as many as 16 offences, including that of criminal conspiracy, disobeying the law and forging documents.
A three-judge bench including Chief Justice D.Y Chandrachud had on November 6 last year directed the Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh government to pay Tibrewal a compensation of Rs 25 lakh after his two-storey ancestral house and shop were unlawfully demolished by officials for widening a highway.
While calling for punitive criminal action against the concerned officials who sanctioned and carried out the demolition, the apex court had underscored that, “Bulldozer justice is simply unacceptable under the rule of law.”
Tibrewal, an accredited journalist, had in October 2019 written to the court complaining of the unlawful demolition of his property in Mohalla Hamid Nagar in Maharajganj. The court had registered the complaint as a suo motu writ petition and in 2020 issued notice to the District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police Maharajganj.
In its order in November 2024, the apex court bench had directed the chief secretary of UP to take suitable action including penal measures to ensure accountability of individual officials who acted in violation of law.
‘Spiteful’ because of reports
On December 30, 2024 Maharajganj police registered an FIR on a complaint that Tibrewal had submitted to the state Director General of Police on March 5, 2020. The demolition of his property took place on September 13, 2019. In his complaint, Tibrewal alleged that his ancestral property was demolished by officials led by the then DM Upadhyay in connivance with other officials, police officers, engineers and contractors as part of a “big conspiracy.” The DM adopted “an oppressive and spiteful attitude” and tore down his house to rubble with “criminal intent,” Tibrewal said in the FIR.
He said that the administration took a vindictive action against him after his father Sushil Kumar had just days before the demolition in a written complaint demanded a probe into alleged irregularities and corruption in the construction of the 21-km stretch of the National Highway-730 (from km 484 to 505) at a cost of Rs 185 crore. Kumar had demanded a probe by a Special Investigation Team alleging that there were major irregularities, “commission-taking” and corruption in the construction of the road. Reports about this complaint were published in local newspapers. Following this, the DM, his associate officials, government engineers and contractors started harbouring a grudge against the family, alleged Tibrewal.
DM’s chequered past
Upadhyay, who was promoted as an IAS officer in 2016, was District Magistrate of Maharajganj from March 2018 to October 2019, when he was suspended along with four other officials for alleged “financial irregularities” in maintaining a cow conservation centre and over-reporting the number of destitute cattle in it. The matter pertained to the Madhwalia Gau Sadan in Maharajganj in Eastern UP. A preliminary probe committee had found that the number of destitute cows mentioned in the register did not match the actual figures. An on-field inspection revealed there were only 954 cattle heads, but the register showed 2,500.
Upadhyay got his next posting as a special secretary, political pension, freedom fighter soldier board department from June 14, 2020. In July last year, he was posted as special secretary in the UP Handicapped Empowerment Department, based in Lucknow.
Human rights in ‘shreds’
In his complaint, Tibrewal provided details of how the officials demolished his property along with all family’s belongings and medicines in the shop on September 13, 2019, “tearing human rights to shreds.” He said that officials demolished his ancestral house without a legal notice, without any acquisition process or due compensation. Within minutes, the house and the shop were turned into rubble, he said.
Alleging that officials forcibly vacated the family from the house, Tibrewal said they did not even get a minute’s time to retrieve valuables from a cash box. Describing the “inhuman and criminal act” in detail, he alleged that the officials and police even misbehaved with his mother and pregnant sister-in-law as they used physical force against them.
Tibrewal said that his grandfather Peetram Tibrewal had purchased the property in the 1960s through a registered deed. The house was then registered in government documents in his mother Laxmi Devi’s name through his grandfather’s will. Tibrewal and his family had been living in the house for the last 45 years.
Tibrewal also said that a day before the demolition, the DM had called him and asked his father and younger brother Mohit to attend a meeting in his camp office regarding the road widening project. Police officers, officials of the National Highway authority, and district administration and the project supervisor of the national highway were already present in the meeting.
Tibrewal said that they were told that construction of private land would not be demolished and that work would progress only according to the width of the road available to the Public Works Department as per the revenue map.
A mysterious u-turn
Officials then marked in yellow 26 feet of road on each side of the highway and asked Tibrewal to demolish a part of his property coming within the five feet radius of the plan. He said he panicked and demolished the said portion overnight. However, the next day he was shocked to find that the officials had mysteriously changed their decision, keeping his family “in the dark” and demolished his entire house with bulldozers and excavators. Heavy deployment of police was used to block the road before the demolition.
He alleged that all those named in the FIR were part of a conspiracy of financial wrongdoing and corruption in the arbitrary demolition of properties for road widening without following proper rules or prescribed measurements.
The FIR included charges of rioting, criminal conspiracy, disobeying the law with the intention to cause injury, creating incorrect documents, voluntarily causing hurt, criminal intimidation, mischief, use of forged documents as genuine, forgery, assault or criminal force with the intent to dishonour a person, wrongful confinement, and engaging in rash or negligent actions to endanger the personal safety or life of others.
Those named in the FIR included ADM Maharajganj Kunj Bihari Agarwal, Rajesh Jaiswal, then executive officer of Maharajganj municipality Rajesh Jaiswal, superintendent engineers Manikant Agarwal and Ashok Kanojia, engineers Dev Anand Yadav, R.K Singh and Rakesh Kumar. Two inspectors of the Local Intelligence Unit, Rajan Srivastava and Santosh Kumar, were also named in the FIR. As were nine other police officers – station house officer Maharajganj city Sarvesh Kumar Singh, inspector Nirbhay Kumar, outpost in-charge Neeraj Rai and sub-inspectors S.K Singh Raghuvanshi, Avinash Tripathi, Jai Shankar Mishra, Ranvijay, Kanchan Rai and Manisha Singh.
