New Delhi: Nearly three years after former JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar and 9 others were accused of raising anti-India slogans, the Delhi police Monday charged them with sedition.
Kumar, the former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU), described the charge sheet as “politically motivated” and questioned its timing, just months ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.
The 1,200-page charge sheet in which former JNU) students Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya were also arrayed as accused was filed before Metropolitan Magistrate Sumit Anand who put it up for consideration before Chief Metropolitan Magistrate(CMM) Tuesday. Kumar, Khalid and Bhattacharya were arrested and later got bail.
It will be left to the CMM whether or not to take cognisance of the charge sheet in what is known as the JNU sedition case. The maximum punishment for sedition is life term.
The police claimed it has video clips to prove the offence which has been corroborated by the statements of the witnesses and that Kumar was leading a procession and allegedly supported seditious slogans raised on the JNU campus in February 2016.
Kumar, who faced allegations that he had incited the mob to shout anti-India slogans, said the charge sheet was a “diversionary ploy by the Modi government to hide its all-round failures”.
“The charge sheet is politically motivated. However, we want the charges to be framed and a speedy trial in the case so that the truth comes out. We also want to see the videos that have been placed on record as evidence by the police,” he said.
The accused were named in the charge sheet for allegedly shouting anti-India slogans during an event on the university’s campus February 9, 2016, to commemorate the hanging of Parliament-attack mastermind Afzal Guru.
The other seven accused chargesheeted in the case are Kashmiri students Aquib Hussain, Mujeeb Hussain, Muneeb Hussain, Umar Gul, Rayeea Rassol, Bashir Bhat and Basharat, some of them were then studying in JNU, Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia.
As many as 36 others, including Communist Party of India (CPI) leader D Raja’s daughter Aprajita, Shehla Rashid (then vice-JNUSU president), Rama Naga, Ashutosh Kumar and Banojyotsna Lahiri, all former students of JNU, have been named in column 12 of the charge sheet due to insufficient evidence against them, police sources said.
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