“Don’t let us become an investigative agency,” the High Court on Monday said firmly, while rejecting a lawyer’s plea to treat the weekend attack on foreign students at state-run Gujarat University as a primary PIL.

A division bench of the high court, headed by Chief Justice Sunita Agrawal and Justice Aniruddha P Mayee, stressed that they were not police inspectors and emphasized their role as a constitutional court.

The judge refused to allow Somotu to admit the incident and stressed that police would deal with the matter.

The court’s position was clear that not all incidents in the city required a PIL.

“Our effort is to deliver justice, but do not make us an investigative agency. We are not doing that. We still want to remind ourselves that we are a constitutional court.”

The chief justice said: “If such issues arise we would certainly consider them, but this is not one of them.”

The decision came after lawyer KR Koshti urged the HC to treat the issue as a “suo motu PIL”.

The chief justice stressed, “Don’t replace this court with a police inspector… We are not investigators.” If there are doubts about an FIR filed by the police, the court advised lawyers to seek legal recourse.

According to police, around two dozen people broke into the government-run Gujarat University hostel in Ahmedabad on Saturday night to object to foreign students holding worship near the facility where they were staying.

Police earlier said two students, one from Sri Lanka and the other from Tajikistan, were admitted to hospital following the incident in Block A hostel.

They said an FIR has been registered against 20 to 25 unidentified attackers and nine teams have been formed to investigate the incident.

Five people have been arrested so far in connection with the incident, police said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)