A Sessions Court denied Tawde any further leeway after granting her a 'last chance' exemption at the previous hearing, with trial now set to begin in the decade-old case.
A Mumbai court has run out of patience with Mumbai Mayor Ritu Tawde's absences. Additional Sessions Judge G G Bhansali imposed a cost of ₹300 on the BJP corporator on Tuesday, after she skipped yet another hearing in a case that goes back to July 2016.
This isn't Tawde's first pass. The judge noted that the court had already granted her an exemption at the last hearing, and had explicitly called it her final one. When her lawyer showed up again asking to excuse her from appearing in person, the court agreed, but not without a price. Two other accused in the case were fined the same amount.
All three now have to pay up before the next hearing, scheduled for October 7.
The case itself dates back to an incident at a municipal Urdu-medium school in Vakola. According to the prosecution, Tawde and six others walked into the school on July 29, 2016, and got into a heated confrontation with the management. The dispute, per the FIR, was over the transfer of a teacher who had cancer. What followed, prosecutors allege, was an assault on two school teachers by the group.
The FIR was registered nearly two weeks later, on August 11, 2016. Tawde has pushed back on the framing of events since, telling the court that her presence at the school that day was coincidental and had nothing to do with any mob action, as she has put it.
Charges have already been framed against Tawde and the other accused, and the court has indicated the trial is close to getting underway. That's the bit worth watching here. This has been sitting on court dockets for nearly a decade, and a sitting mayor being formally tried on assault allegations tied to a government school dispute isn't the kind of thing that stays quiet once witnesses start taking the stand.
For now, the fine is small change, literally. But it's a signal from the bench that exemption requests from a public office holder aren't going to be waved through indefinitely, especially once a case has moved from pending charges to an actual trial date. Whether Tawde appears in person on October 7 or asks for exemption again remains to be seen. Either way, the next hearing is when this case stops being a paperwork matter and starts being a courtroom one.
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