Nearly three years after former JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar and nine others were accused of raising anti-India slogans, the Delhi Police on Monday charged them with sedition.
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.
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) on Tuesday. Kumar, Khalid and Bhattacharya were arrested and later got bail.
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 accused were named in the charge sheet for allegedly shouting anti-India slogans during an event on the university’s campus on February 9, 2016, to commemorate the hanging of Parliament-attack mastermind Afzal Guru.
The other seven accused charge-sheeted 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.
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