The activist’s counsel advocate Govind Parmar said Patkar has filed her written objections to Saxena’s application and the same will be argued before the Ahmedabad magisterial court on March 15. Patkar has sought that Saxena’s application be dismissed with costs.

Patkar was allegedly attacked during a meeting of civil rights activists to appeal for peace when Gujarat was undergoing communal riots outside Sabarmati Gandhi Ashram. Saxena, along with three others, has been accused of unlawful assembly, rioting, voluntarily causing hurt, wrongful restraint, intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace and criminal intimidation, in the 2002 case.

On March 1, Saxena had, invoking Constitutional provisions that grant immunity to governors and the President of India from being answerable to courts while holding office, filed an application seeking that the criminal trial against him instituted before the magistrate court in 2005 be kept in abeyance till the time he occupied the L-G office. Saxena stated that the L-G of NCT Delhi “enjoys the ‘status of office’ higher than Governor and lower than the President”.

Patkar, in her reply objecting to Saxena’s application, submitted that L-G “is not a Governor in terms of Article 153 of the Constitution of India but merely an administrator of a Union Territory who is appointed by the President to act on his behalf.”

She also relied on a five-judge Constitutional bench judgement of 2018, which held that the status of the L-G of Delhi is not that of a Governor of a state and “rather he remains an administrator, in a limited sense, working with the designation of Lieutenant Governor.”