A division bench comprising acting Chief Justice Nishita Mhatre and Justice T Chakraborty directed the Centre to provide the forces from the CRPF in addition to 11 companies of the Central Armed Police Force (CAPF) already deployed there.
The court also directed the state government to provide additional forces from its own resources in order to bring back normalcy in the hills, where an indefinite bandh demanding separate statehood has been going on for the last one month.
The Centre, in reply to the state's request for replacement of three Mahila companies of CRPF, today said through an affidavit that the women members of the force could not be discriminated against.
On the state's request for replacing three companies of SSB from the restive Darjeeling hills claiming that they were familiar with the local people, the Centre submitted that it was not a cogent reason to replace the SSB companies as they worked without bias.
Out of the 11 companies of CAPF, there are three from SSB, three Mahila CRPF companies and the rest are CRPF companies comprising men.
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