The Wire India 30 April 2020
At a time when the entire country is on a pandemic-induced lockdown and only essential services are being allowed to operate, should the Central government have hurriedly begun acting on its hypothesis that the recent communal violence in North-East Delhi was provoked or planned by anti-CAA protestors? This is not just an academic poser but a question that needs to be addressed with utmost urgency while examining the Modi government’s priorities in the face of one of the biggest public health, social and economic crises to hit independent India, writes Seemi Pasha.
A little over a month into the lockdown, students and alumni of Jamia Millia Islamia University who had participated in and organised protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act on campus are being served notices by the Delhi Police. Some of them have been arrested for allegedly ‘hatching a conspiracy’ that led to riots in the national capital and booked under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).
Some of these students may have visited protest sites in North-East Delhi, but that does not mean they were involved in organising the protests that came up on the Shaheen Bagh model. The case made out by the police also fails to take into account the fact that anti-CAA protest sites in Jaffrabad, Maujpur, Kardampuri, Gokulpuri and Shiv Vihar were targeted by mobs during the communal violence that raged in these parts of North-East Delhi in February. Never mind the fact that the violence broke out within hours of BJP politician Kapil Mishra’s speech where he threatened to remove the anti-CAA protesters who were staging a demonstration outside the Jaffrabad Metro station if the police did not do so within three days.
Officially, the stand of the government on a high court petition seeking registration of a case against Mishra is that the “time is not ripe” for filing an FIR. Yet this has not come in the way of an FIR, numbered 59/2020 – first registered by the Crime Branch on March 6, 2020 – naming JNU student Umar Khalid and a person by the name of Danish as the prime accused. Subsequently, Jamia students Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar were arrested in connection with the allegations stated in the FIR. Safoora is three months pregnant.
After the arrest of Haider (who is also president of the youth wing of the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Delhi) and Zargar (who was the Jamia Coordination Committee’s media coordinator) in the first two weeks of April, the Special Cell added UAPA charges to the FIR. Shifa-Ur Rehman, the president of the Alumni Association of Jamia Millia Islamia (AAJMI), was arrested on April 26. There are also reports that close to 50 members of the Jamia Coordination Committee, which includes students and alumni, have been served notices by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police.