New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government on Thursday filed a review petition in the apex Supreme Court (SC) against its March 20 verdict on the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Act, stating that dilution of the Act has resulted in “great damage to the country.”

“This judgement has diluted the provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act read with the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, resulting in great damage to the country. It is essential that the conclusions be reviewed and recalled, so that no basis for misunderstanding the judgement or its impact on the implementation of the Atrocities Act would continue,” Attorney General K.K. Venugopal said in his written submission to the top court.

He said the court dealt with an issue of a “very sensitive nature”.

“This case dealing with an issue of very sensitive nature has caused a lot of commotion in the country and is also creating anger, unease and a sense of disharmony. The confusion created by this judgement may have to be corrected by reviewing the judgement and recalling the directions issued by this Honourable Court,” the submission further read.

The government said the entire judgement was “vitiated” as it proceeded on the basis that the court has the power to make law when none existed.

“The bland statement that power to declare law carries with it, within the limits of duty, to make law when none exists is wholly fallacious, because we live under a written Constitution, of which separation of powers between the legislatures, the executive and the judiciary is the very basic structure and is inviolable. What else, therefore, does it mean, if in the teeth of the separation of powers, the highest court in the country says that the judiciary in the country can lay down law contrary to a statute passed by Parliament,” the Attorney General said.

The government submitted that the top court was not “filling in gaps” but was “amending” through judicial legislation.

“In India, separation of powers being part of the basic structure of the Constitution, there was no room for the court declaring that it could legislate and make plenary law. They are, pure and simple, the exercise of the power of plenary legislation. The confusion created by the judgement, it is submitted, deserves to be corrected,” it said.

The court has already clarified that it did not dilute the law but introduced safeguards for the innocent.

“We have not diluted any provision of SC/ST Act and only safeguarded interest of innocents from being arrested. The provisions of the Act cannot be used to terrorise the innocents. The SC/ST Act is a substantive law and we have just asked that implementation of it would require adherence to procedural law as given in criminal procedure code,” the SC observed.

In order to prevent misuse of the provisions of the SC/ST Act, the Court, on March 20, had ruled out automatic registration of a First Information Report (FIR) and immediate arrest in a complaint made under the Act.

“We have already noted the working of the Act in the last three decades. It has been judicially acknowledged that there are instances of abuse of the Act by vested interests against political opponents in Panchayat, Municipal or other elections, to settle private civil disputes arising out of property, monetary disputes, employment disputes and seniority disputes,” a bench of Justices Adarsh K. Goel and Uday U. Lalit observed.

Expressing concern over the alleged dilution of the Act, Dalits (those belonging to lower castes) came out in heavy numbers last week to enforce an all-India shutdown, in which 11 people died.

They have criticised the verdict claiming that the dilution of the Act will lead to more discrimination.