The Maharashtra State Human Rights Commission has awarded two lac rupees to the man who was wrongly picked up for posting “derogatory” stuff about Shivaji on a social networking site.
Almost two years after he was wrongly jailed for 50 days, Lakshmana Kailash K, 28-year-old Bangalore-based software engineer, will be a relieved man. Criticising the erroneous police investigation and the internet service provider’s ‘misleading information’, the State Human Rights Commission has ordered the company to pay Rs 2 lakh to Lakshmana as damages.
Lakshmana was at his Bangalore residence, when eight Pune policemen arrested him in the wee hours on August 31, 2007 for uploading derogatory texts and pictures of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj on Orkut. He was brought to Pune and lodged in Yerwada jail, where he spent 50 days. The investigating officer, ACP Netaji Shinde of the Pune cyber crime branch (now retired), gathered the IP address from the service provider Bharti Airtel company, Bangalore, to get to Lakshmana. Both Pune police and Bharti Airtel apologised to Lakshmana for the error, when he was released on October 20 — nearly three weeks after the police picked up three Bangalore boys as the ‘real culprits’.
Posting “derogatory texts and pictures” anywhere should never have been a crime in the first place. But then, we are a dumb nation.
