Govandi activist discharged under stringent NDPS Act

The case against Shaikh was filed in May 2024, at the fag end of the Lok Sabha poll campaign, in which the Govandi Citizens Welfare Forum had actively campaigned for the INDIA alliance candidate and Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Dina Patil

Mumbai: Civic activist Faiyaz Shaikh, convenor of the Govandi Citizens Welfare Forum, was on Tuesday discharged from a case filed against him under the stringent Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985. The order by special NDPS judge SM Patil, uploaded on Wednesday, said there was not enough evidence to proceed against Shaikh under section 8 of the Act, which relates to selling narcotics.

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“This wasn’t just a case. It was a calculated attempt to crush my image and silence my voice as a civic activist,” a relieved Shaikh told HT.

The case against Shaikh was filed in May 2024, at the fag end of the Lok Sabha poll campaign, in which the Govandi Citizens Welfare Forum had actively campaigned for the INDIA alliance candidate and Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Dina Patil. Patil went on to defeat the BJP’s sitting MP from Mumbai North East, Manoj Kotak.

“I had also filed many petitions in the high court which had exposed the authorities’ negligence towards Govandi’s problems,” Shaikh, also president of the Govandi New Sangam Welfare Society, a registered NGO, said.

In September 2023, in response to the NGO’s petition, the Bombay high court had directed the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to shift the bio-medical waste incinerator functioning in Govandi since 2009 within two years.

Shaikh and his colleagues are currently agitating against the BMC’s plan to set up a waste to energy plant in the highly polluted suburb that houses the city’s largest dumping ground. They have also come into conflict with the powerful sitting MLA of Mankhurd-Shivaji Nagar, Abu Asim Azmi, as the Govandi Citizens Welfare Forum is fighting against encroachment of the few public spaces available in Govandi.

“It is extremely rare to get a discharge under the NDPS Act,” Shaikh’s lawyer Nilesh Bangar told HT. “Especially in a case involving commercial quantities of narcotics.”

Faiyaz was named as an accused in the case based on the statement of the prime accused, Tauhid Shaikh, who was charged with possession of 15 bottles of cough syrup containing codeine phosphate, a narcotic.

In the special NDPS court, Bangar relied on Supreme Court and high court judgments to show that his client’s discharge was justified as the police had no material against him except the allegation made by the co-accused. He also cited a judgment which said that when the judge was certain that there was no prospect of the case ending in conviction, valuable time of the court should not be wasted.

Accepting the plea, the judge ruled that there was nothing to show prima facie involvement of Faiyaz Shaikh in the offence. Nothing was seized from him and even statements of two witnesses recorded by the police did not show that he was in any way linked with the offence the prime accused was charged with.

Shaikh was earlier granted anticipatory bail in the case, a day after the first information report (FIR) was registered, a near-impossibility in cases under the NDPS Act.