A court in Delhi on Monday directed the Delhi Police to give copies of the charge sheet and related documents to former students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, and eight others in a 2016 sedition case.
Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) Pankaj Sharma put up the matter for April 7 to scrutinise documents in the case and also granted bail to seven accused who were not arrested in the case earlier.
The seven accused include Aquib, Mujeeb, Umar Gul, Rayees Rasool, Basharat Ali, Khalid Basheer who were not arrested before the filing of the charge sheet.
They moved bail applications after which the court granted them bail on a personal bond of Rs 25,000 and a surety of a like amount.
Kumar, Umar Khalid (who is already in custody in Delhi riots case), Anirban and seven others were present in court in pursuance to summons issued by the court after taking cognisance of the charge sheet.
Kumar and others, including former JNU students Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, were booked under sedition and other charges for allegedly raising anti-India slogans during an event at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
The charge sheet filed by the Delhi Police claims that Kumar and others named in the case had raised seditious slogans at JNU on 9 February 2016. The slogans were allegedly raised at an event to mark the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.
The other students named in the charge sheet include Kumar, Khalid, Anirban Bhattacharya, Aquib Hussain, Mujeeb Hussain Gattoo, Muneeb Hussain Gattoo, Umar Gul, Rayees Rasool, Basharat Ali and Khalid Bashir Bhatt.
The accused have been charged with offences under sections 124A (sedition), 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt), 471 (using as genuine a forged document or electronic record), 143 (punishment for being a member of an unlawful assembly), 149 (being a member of an unlawful assembly), 147 (punishment for rioting) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
A case was registered on February 11, 2016 under sections 124A and 120B of the IPC against unidentified people at the Vasant Kunj (North) Police Station, following complaints from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Maheish Girri and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the RSS.
(With inputs from ANI and PTI)
