Ahead of the Delhi Assembly elections, newly-elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Jagat Prakash Nadda on Monday targeted Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal by invoking the 2016 incident involving Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid.
“Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and other anti-India forces raised seditious slogans like ‘Bharat tere tukde honge’ in JNU. They were threatening to violate India’s sovereignty. Law enforcement agencies moved in, investigated the matter and in Jan 2019 were ready to file chargesheet,” Nadda said on Twitter.
Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and other anti-India forces raised seditious slogans like ‘Bharat tere tukde honge’ in JNU. They were threatening to violate India’s sovereignty. Law enforcement agencies moved in, investigated the matter and in Jan 2019 were ready to file chargesheet.
— Jagat Prakash Nadda (@JPNadda) January 27, 2020
“They sought Kejriwal’s permission to prosecute this tukde tukde gang but one year later, till y’day, no permission was granted. Kejriwal must tell Delhi why is he supporting those who want to break India? Is it because acting against these anti-nationals will hurt his vote bank?” he further said in his second tweet.
Kanhaiya Kumar, former students’ union president of JNU, and fellow university student Umar Khalid, were arrested and booked under sedition charges after anti-national slogans were allegedly chanted in February 2016 on the university campus. Kumar, Khalid and eight others were named in the Delhi Police chargesheet filed in January last year.
But since then, says the BJP, the Kejriwal government has not given sanction to prosecute the students. In December last year, BJP leader and former MLA Nand Kishore Garg approached the Delhi High Court seeking directions to the Delhi government to give sanction to prosecute these students, but it was dimissed.
The BJP leader had accused the state government of “obstruction of justice” by withholding sanction.
Under the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), investigating agencies have to take the approval or sanction of the state government while filing chargesheets in sedition cases. The court had earlier pulled up Delhi Police for filing the chargesheet “without obtaining requisite sanction”. Delhi government officials said the police had sent a copy of the chargesheet to the home department just two hours before they submitted it in court.
Assembly elections in Delhi will take place on February 8 and votes will be counted on February 11. In 2015, Aam Aadmi Party got a landslide victory by winning 67 of the 70 Assembly seats in the national capital.
In its campaign for the assembly elections, the BJP has often raised the issue of the AAP government so far not grating the Delhi Police its nod to prosecute the accused in the case of raising seditious slogans in the JNU.
