A day after 22-year-old TISS student Urvashi Chudawala’s anticipatory bail application was rejected, the Azad Maidan police on Thursday said Chudawala was still untraceable. While some legal experts have raised doubts about the sedition charge being applied in this case, several former Maharashtra top cops, however, backed the police action.
Chudawala and `50 others’ were booked for sedition on February 3, for slogans raised in support of JNU student Sharjeel Imam at the Queer Azadi Mumbai (QAM) march, organised by various LGBT groups led by Humsafar Trust, on February 1 at Azad Maidan.
Imam is a scholar of Jawaharlal Nehru University, who was picked from Bihar recently and booked for sedition. He had allegedly made remarks about how Muslims in could choke the Chicken Neck area in North East to snap the link between Assam and India.
“The IPC section of sedition was applied on the student on the basis of a video available with the police, and the same fact has been pointed in the court when her anticipatory bail application was rejected. It is very wrong to say that police have applied any wrong sections,” said Pravin Dixit, former Maharashtra DGP.
“The charges applied by the police are right. In the name of freedom of expression if one starts to abuse and use bad words is it allowed? People are misinterpreting freedom of expression and crossing their limits,” said former Mumbai Police Commissioner M N Singh.
“Sedition charges applied on Chudawala are absolutely right. We all have freedom of speech, but not against the country,” said Y C Pawar, who retired from service in 2001 as Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) in Mumbai. “If we have freedom of speech, then why are defamation cases being registered? The cases are registered when the freedom of speech is misused to the detriment of others. We all have the freedom of speech, but not of causing harm to others,” Pawar said.
