FRAMED BY THE PRESS: THE STORY OF ACTIVIST UMAR KHALID.

Former JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar and nine others including Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya appeared before a Delhi court in connection with a sedition case. The accused ten were summoned after the court took cognisance of the chargesheet on February 16. Umar was captured in September 2020 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in the north-east Delhi riots connivance case. Umar, alongside a few others, has been blamed for being the "engineer" of the February 2020 viciousness for CAA, which left 53 individuals dead and more than 700 injured.

JNU SEDITION ROW On February 9, 2016, Khalid, Bhattacharya and others had organised a “poetry reading” session titled “The country without a post office”, after Agha Shahid Ali’s poem of the same name, to mark the third anniversary of the execution of 2001 Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. In the session, which was violently disrupted by the RSS’s student arm, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), Kanhaiya Kumar, who was then president of the JNU Students’ Union, along with others, was accused of chanting “anti-national” slogans. Four days after the initial event, the Delhi Police arrested JNU Student Union president Kanhaiya Kumar and five other students on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy.

DELHI RIOTS CONSPIRACY: WHAT THE POLICE SAYS- The core of the police case is that the “communal riot incidents” of February 2020 in Delhi were “pre-planned” by Khalid and the others. Khalid is accused of giving provocative speeches and urging people to come out on the roads to ensure that the “propaganda of minorities in India are being persecuted” may get publicised during the visit of US President Donald Trump (on February 24-25). Police have also claimed to have gathered evidence against the accused in the form of WhatsApp chats that were allegedly used in the “execution of the conspiracy”, alleged witness statements, and evidence of the receipt of funds from within India and overseas.

GUILTY OR INNOCENT? The instance of subversion against Umar Khalid in the north-east Delhi riots trick case depends on YouTube clasps of his shortened discourse tweeted by a BJP pioneer, his attorney told a neighborhood court on Monday while looking for bail for the previous JNU understudy pioneer. Umar's legal advisor Trideep Pais told extra meetings judge Amitabh Rawat that Umar Khalid was being "outlined" and every one of the charges against him were "manufactured" and "empty". He said that witnesses have been taken specifically and that there were different logical inconsistencies in the police's cases demonstrating that it was a "concocted" case.

THE VIDEO CLIP Pais said that the 21-minute video clip of Khalid's discourse in Maharashtra, which the indictment supposedly marked fiery, called for message of solidarity dependent on Mahatma Gandhi's lessons. The attorney said that the clasps gave to the police by two TV channels were duplicated from a tweet by a BJP pioneer, rather than the first film of the discourse. The legal advisor said that Umar didn't give any call for brutality in his discourse. "A message of solidarity dependent on Gandhi ji was given by Umar Khalid that day. It was named as fear. Content isn't subversive. He is discussing popularity based force. He alluded to Gandhi," Pais said.

WHAT OTHERS SAY- “Khalid was one of the hundreds of voices that spoke up in favour of the constitution. The repeated attempts to implicate Khalid in fictitious case are an attempt to suppress the dissent.”- This statement was signed by Prashant Bhushan, Harsh Mander, T M Krishna, Ram Guha and several others. “Delhi Police’s investigation into the riots is a conspiracy itself. Khalid’s arrest is an attack on the real opposition in India and a part of a larger design by police to link anti-CAA protests with the Delhi riots.” said Yogendra Yadav .

BAIL In April, Umar was conceded bail in one of the mobs cases. The court while allowing him bail noticed that he was not actually present at the location of the crime on the date of the occurrence. The police are yet to contend the bail. The case will be heard next on September 3, 2021.