Delhi University professor Hany Babu’s wife Jenny Rowena has said his arrest in the Bhima Koregaon case was due to the ideals he stood for - his anti-caste beliefs and work for implementation of reservations in Delhi University.
“In DU there were no seats for OBCs, he filed RTI’s, it took a year, he sent it to MP’s and made it happen,” she said. The family will face this as they are not fragile people, she said, but that it is “unjust” and that “systems are failing”. “We are worried about what is happening in the country. Is this is the message they want to send out, that people who have politics different from theirs, will be behind bars,” she asked.
Babu had no inkling that being summoned by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) as a ‘witness’ in the Bhima Koregaon case, he will be arrested. “He went without a change of clothes. He thought he would be back in a day,” she says.
Hany Babu whose interrogation by the NIA began on June 24, ended in his arrest four days later on June 28. Rowena also says that his association as a convenor of the Committee for the Defence and Release of GN Saibaba was a reason for him being targeted.
Their house in Noida had been raided in September last year and his laptop and some books seized by NIA sleuths who did not have a search warrant. Rowena, who also teaches at Miranda House in Delhi says the officers did follow the procedure of giving a hash value which can determine the integrity of data as no two data have the same hash value. “They say they have found a folder with incriminating material. He had no such letters which they claim to have found,” Rowena says, calling them “planted”.
