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New Delhi: The Delhi Police on Saturday arrested two founding members of Pinjra Tod, a women-led rights movement, to take part in a sit-in protest against the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) in Jafrabad in the Capital in February of this year.
Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, both students at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, had been at the forefront of the Pinjra Tod movement, which began as an effort to break punitive hostel curfew hours for women.
It was the Jafrabad anti-CAA protest had prompted BJP leader Kapil Mishra to give an incendiary speech demanding that the protesters leave, after the violence had erupted in northeast Delhi in February of this year, that took the lives of almost 60 people.
While that has not taken any action against Mishra and his followers up to date, the arrest of the Pinjra Tod activists is seen as part of the Delhi police repression against student leaders who had organized against the CAA from the month of December.
Previously, Jamia Millia Islamia students Safoora Zargar, Meeran Haider, Shifa-Ur-Rehman and Asif Iqbal Tanha were arrested and slapped with the stringent terror law Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in connection with their alleged involvement in the Delhi violence.
Zargar, who is lodged in the Jail of Tihar, is pregnant.
Pinjra Tod activists said both Kalita and Narwal were arrested around 6 pm on Saturday night by the staff of the Jafrabad police station, soon after the New Delhi Range of Special Cell officials interrogated their homes.
They said that the police did not offer any reason to the members of his family before arresting them. The organization has called the police action a “witch hunt of democratic activists.”
Meanwhile, Ved Prakash Surya, DCP (north-east), confirmed that the two activists had been arrested under article 186 (obstruction of public official in the exercise of public functions) and 353 (assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty) of the Indian Penal Code.
Curiously, the FIR registered against them makes no mention of an assault or criminal force against a public official.
The FIR tree simply says that the two activists were among those who led a group of women and children to organize a sit-in protest under the Jafrabad overhead metro from the train station on the night of February 22, 2020. While the FIR says the group blocked traffic and raised slogans against the CAA, there is no allegation of violence against them.
Kalita is pursuing her M. Phil degree in the Center for the Study of Women, while Narwal is a Phd student in the Centre for Historical Studies. Both had graduated from the University of Delhi before joining JNU.
Commenting on the arrests, a New Delhi-based lawyer Sarim Ships said, “there was no need to stop them. The incident occurred in February, however, the police arrested in May. The two activists had not gone to any place. The police should have ideally filed a chargesheet, and asked them to cooperate in the investigation, rather than arresting them.”
The repression of the students in a time when India is in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic is being seen by some in the opposition as an opportunistic act by the government of Modi from public protests are prohibited.
Before the arrest of the students of Jamia, the Delhi police took the time to first clear the protest of art students had painted on the walls of the university.
Since then he has been researching several students who had peacefully protested against the polemic of the CAA and trying to link his non-violent protest to the Delhi riots case.
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