Bombay high court orders four men to do community service

The court said it would quash FIRs filed against two groups only if all of them served a community for four consecutive Sundays

The Bombay high court has ordered four men, belonging to two different communities, to do community service for four consecutive Sundays after they pleaded the court to quash first-information reports (FIRs) they filed against each other.

The complainants — one set aged 19 and 22; the other, 18 and 19 — in December 2017, had gotten into a scuffle during the Mahim fair, after one of them was pushed and the subsequent arguments turned into an altercation, in which one of the petitioners was grievously injured.

This led the two groups to file an FIR against one another. But in their petition, they claimed they had reached a settlement outside the court and wanted the FIRs to be quashed because their convictions would not serve any purpose but only create more prejudice against one another.

A division bench of justices BP Dharmadhikari and Revati Mohite Dere, hearing the petition, accepted the contentions of the youths and said it would quash the FIRs only if all of them performed community service at the Mahim dargah. The court also directed one of the teenagers to score 70% in his examinations.