The HC was hearing a plea by Devika Rotawan, who was nine years old at the time of the 26/11 attack, was at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, along with her father and brother, on November 26, 2008.
The Bombay High Court ordered the State Housing Minister to take Devika Rotawan’s request for a house under the economically weaker section (EWS) quota into consideration on Wednesday, noting that her case is genuine and that it needs to be handled with greater sensitivity and consideration for her human rights.
before 2022, Rotawan filed a petition before the HC asking the government to give a residence to the state chief secretary, but the request was denied.
The bench stated that the government ought to have taken the same into consideration in extraordinary circumstances after a government attorney on Wednesday claimed that Rotawan’s plea for accommodations under the EWS quota cannot be taken into consideration.
Hearing Rotawan’s 2022 appeal through attorney Kunickaa Sadanand, a division bench of Justices Girish S. Kulkarni and Firdosh P. Pooniwalla was considering his request for a house allotment against the state government’s denial of it. The petitioner, who was 23 years old at the time, claimed to be living in a slum and to be dependent on her parents when she applied for housing under the EWS quota.
A different bench of the HC ordered the state government to take into account Rotawan’s plea in October 2020 and instructed the registrar to send a copy of the plea to the state chief secretary for review.
On November 26, 2008, Rotawan, who was nine years old at the time, was at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus with her father and brother. During the attack, she was shot in the leg. She was brought by police to St. George’s Hospital, where she spent over half of a year in bed after undergoing six surgeries in less than two months.
Ajmal Kasab was the sole terrorist to be apprehended alive, and she was one of the witnesses in the terror attack trial at a local court.
On Wednesday, Additional Government Pleader Jyoti Chavan informed the bench that requests for accommodations under the EWS quota are not eligible to be entertained, per the guidelines and directives from Housing department authorities.Nonetheless, the bench noted that the department’s decision lacked “any application of mind.”
The bench, feeling “unhappy” and dissatisfied with the under secretary of the department’s “mechanical” judgment, ordered that the representation file be presented to the housing minister so that he or she may consider the “peculiar facts” of the case and make a “appropriate decision.” The HC continued by stating that it was aware that hundreds of allotments under the EWS quota were made on a regular basis and that these allotments frequently failed to pass the “test of law” in a number of cases contesting them.
“When a legitimate case is brought before the department, it will undoubtedly call for greater human empathy, adherence to fundamental human rights, and, in particular, the experience of being a victim of terrorism. These, in our judgment, are actual situations in which authorities would have to use discretion in a way that is proper given that discretion is otherwise frequently used and judged to be in situations that we shouldn’t compare to the one at hand. We leave it to the minister to make the right choice,” the HC noted.
It further stated that the undersecretary was not appreciated for being told to “foist” the department file in court without an affidavit to assume responsibility for the decision for the two years since May 2022.
When the matter comes up for hearing again in two weeks, the bench requested to see the Minister’s decision. “We are quite astonished at the snail’s pace at which the decision is taken that too in a matter which raises issues of basic human rights and right to shelter of a victim of terrorist attack,” the bench said.
BY- HHM