Mumbai: A sessions court on Wednesday rejected the anticipatory bail plea of 22-year-old Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) student Urvashi Chudawala saying that the intent of the slogans uttered by her in support of JNU student Sharjeel Imam prima facie attract ingredients of the charge of sedition.
Arguing for Chudawala, her advocate Vijay Hiremath told the court that the fear is that Chudawala was being made an example of to the entire city. “The message through me (Chudawala) is that they (police) will make sedition case against protesting people, as now protests are going on across the country. Everything cannot be an offence or it will be very difficult for anybody to survive in this country.” he said adding that an innocuous statement was being taken out of context and she was being targetted.
Additional Sessions Judge Prashant P Rajvaidya said in his order that since the section attracts a life term, the offences registered against Chudawala are definitely serious. Not granting Chudawala interim relief, judge Rajvaidya said he had decided the matter on merits, and that custodial interrogation was required to reach the root of the matter.
Hiremath had argued, “In every Left protest, they say ‘Ladenge, Jeetenge (We’ll fight, We’ll win), but it refers to fight against the system and injustice. Inquilab Zindabad is being uttered in many protests. It doesn’t mean independence from the country,”
He said that Chudawala is only 22-year-old and a final-year student who’s exams are due in April, and has seen a lot of discrimination in life as she identifies as a transperson. The slogan ‘Sharjeel hum tumhare sapnon ko manzil tak pahunchayenge’ (Sharjeel, we will see that your dreams are realized), which she had shouted, Hiremath told the court, was only uttered once among many other slogans, also against CAA and NRC. “The video (of sloganeering) itself shows other slogans in support of Rohit Vemula, Payal Tadvi and Babasaheb Ambedkar. To these, in zest, one name of Sharjeel was added,” he said. The FIR, he said, was misleading as only one slogan is picked out from many shouted.
To this, judge Rajvaidya asked if he was not disputing that his client uttered the slogan. Hiremath said that it was a matter of trial and as of now the video shows it was uttered. When asked by the judge what was in Sharjeel’s dream, he said that the protest was in the context of the freedom of speech being curtailed. He said further that sedition has not been proved against Sharjeel and he has just been arrested.
The FIR, he added, does not fall under apex court guidelines to register a case under sedition. “There should be a call for violence or it there should be violence. There is no word pitching one community against the other,” he said.
Chief Public Prosecutor Jaisingh Desai argued that the slogan in support of Sharjeel had to be taken into account as Sharjeel wanted to separate Assam from India and that his was language to break the country. He showed the court a Facebook post of a day prior to the protest, in which Chudawala had liked a post of someone with Sharjeel’s photo which said ‘Release Sharjeel Imam unconditionally’. Desai argued that freedom of speech is not the issue, and Chudawala was supporting a person who was making statements against the country and is ‘officially an enemy of the country’.
Desai told the court the police had tried to contact Chudawala, who answered the call once, but later switched it off. This, he said, showed she did not want to come forward. He also told court that Chudawala had been deleting her social media posts to wipe out evidence.
Hiremath clarified that Chudawala disabled her accounts temporarily to avoid being trolled.
Inputs by Ronald Rodrigues.
