Students, teachers and supporters of four leftist student organizations walk in a procession protesting against the arrest of a student union leader of New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University in Kolkata, India, Wednesday, Feb. 17…
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Claiming threat to life in jail and from lynching mobs in the court complex, Kumar made the bail plea before the apex court which will be heard tomorrow.
The question making rounds is whether delhi Police chief was over-jealous in arresting Kanhaiya Kumar without evidence and secondly filing as big a charge as sedition which attracts three years of jail term to life sentence, besides ruining his life and career forever.
At the Supreme Court on Thursday, a bench of Justices J. Chelameswar and A.M. Sapre, after hearing senior counsel Raju Ramachandran, posted Kanhaiya Kumar’s petition for hearing at 10.30 am Friday along with another petition filed by a lawyer who alleged that his complaint was not registered by the police.
The court also agreed with two senior lawyers who said “extraordinary situations require extraordinary remedy”. The anti-Kanhaiya brigade is calling this clinching proof of the JNU students body president raising anti-India slogans. Protests across the country Thousands of students staged a massive protest in Delhi to demand Kumar’s release.
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and other party leaders told President Mukherjee that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was trying to impose a “flawed” and “dead” ideology of the RSS on the student community.
Expressing solidarity with JNU students and teachers, Jama’at-e-Islami (JeI) Jammu and Kashmir Thursday condemned the “callous” attitude of New-Delhi.
Delhi Police Commissioner B.S. Bassi, however, denied that Kumar was assaulted in the court on Wednesday and justified the sedition charge.
“Clashes took place between AISF and ABVP activists”, a police official said.
Also supported by staff members at SOAS London, and the Universities of Westminster, Warwick, and Edinburgh, it continues: “Under Indian law, sedition applies only to words and actions that directly issue a call to violence”.
And in the southern city of Chennai police arrested Kovan, a folk singer, and 47 members of a left-wing student group for staging a protest in front of a state government building.
“I am yet to see a procedure by which this court can hear such a petition”, Mr Luthra said.
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The arrest has turned into a national controversy, with the opposition and large sections of the JNU students and faculty accusing the government of crushing dissent.
