Walk out in Tripura assembly over conviction rate

FROM A CORRESPONDENT

Agartala, January 11 : Opposition Congress has accused the Left Front government of playing jugglery with the rate of conviction in the CrPC cases only to hide its failure in the law and order front. They even wanted to raise the issue in the state assembly during zero hour and staged walk out when the speaker Ramendra Kumar th refused to allow. The leader of the opposition Sudip Roy Barman angrily said the speaker has failed to maintain neutrality.

The issue came to fore when the law minister in reply to a question said the conviction rate in Tripura was 10.89 per cent which was totally contradictory to a claim made by the director general of police.

Addressing a press conference on January 4 as part of police week celebration the DGP claimed the conviction rate shows a 10 per cent growth from 20 % in 2014 to 30 % in 2015.

The opposition members alleged that not only the DGP, the Chief Minister and the law minister is giving contradictory figures on different time in the state assembly itself. Later, MLA Ratan Lal th showing written reply submitted before the assembly on different time said told reporters that the Chief Minister Manik Sarkar as home minister states that the conviction rate in Tripura was 20 % in 2014 while the law minister said it was 14 %.

He said that a detail survey will prove that the statistics being submitted by the law minister also not correct. He alleged that the ministers are playing jugglery only to hide its failure of the state government. He said even in comparison to other northeastern states Tripura’s performance is deplorable. Apart from Assam where conviction rate is only 11 %, performance of all other states is far better. Tripura’s performance is much lower compare to the tiol average of 41%.

th attributed this failure of Tripura to the state government’s discrimitory attitude in dealing with the cases on political consideration and partisan attitude in appointment of public prosecutors. In many cases the crimils are being released due to mis-handling or motivated handling of the cases by the public prosecutors.