Former chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has written to Madhya Pradesh High Court Chief Justice Ravi Malimath seeking forgiveness for two ABVP functionaries who were arrested for taking the car of a judge to ferry an ailing person to a hospital in Gwalior.

The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad's Gwalior secretary Himanshu Shrotriya (22) and deputy secretary Sukrit Sharma (24) were arrested on Monday under the MP Dakaiti Aur Vyapharan Prabhavit Kshetra Adhiniyam, an anti-dacoity law, after they snatched the car's key from its driver at Gwalior railway station and took Ranjeet Singh, VC of a private university in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, to a hospital.

Their bail was rejected on Wednesday and they are in judicial custody at present.

The ABVP is the students' wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

In his letter written to Justice Malimath on Friday, Chouhan said, "As it is a different sort of crime committed for a holy cause and done on humanitarian ground for saving life, it is worth forgiving. The intention of Himanshu Shrotriya (22) and Sukrit Sharma (24) was not to commit a crime. So keeping in view their future they should be forgiven."

While denying them bail, a special court judge for dacoity cases Sanjay Goyal had observed that one seeks help with politeness and not with force.

The judge, citing the police diary in the incident, said an ambulance, which is the ideal vehicle for such purposes, had arrived to ferry the ailing man.

Earlier, speaking on the issue, Sandeep Vaishnav, the ABVP's MP unit secretary, had defended the duo saying they were trying to help a man whose health condition was deteriorating rapidly and that they did not know the car belonged to a high court judge.

Some ABVP men, who were travelling from Delhi to Gwalior on a train, saw a passenger's health becoming serious. They passed on the information to other ABVP functionaries at Gwalior station. The activists deboarded the sick man at Gwalior station, but no ambulance reached for his help for around 25 minutes, he said.

As the man’s health condition was deteriorating, the ABVP activists rushed him to a hospital in a car parked outside the station but he died, Vaishnav said.

As per Gwalior's Inderganj City Superintendent of Police Ashok Jadon, Ranjeet Singh (68), who was the vice-chancellor of a private university in Uttar Pradesh's Jhansi, died of cardiac failure according to a preliminary post-mortem report.

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