New Delhi: The Delhi high court has once taken objection to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student Umar Khalid’s comments against Prime Minister Narendra Modi made during his February 2020 speech in Maharashtra’s Amaravati, saying that he could have used “some other words” for the PM.
It also sought to understand the context in which Khalid, in the speech, had used the words inquilab (a revolution) and krantikaari (revolutionary).
On Friday, May 20, a division bench of Justice Siddharth Mridul and Justice Bhatnagar heard Khalid’s bail appeal and sought to hear the said speech of Khalid for the third time. The bench had earlier said Khalid’s description in a 2020 speech of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Mahasabha acting as “agents of the British” during the freedom struggle was interpreted by the Delhi high court as “giving the impression that only one community was fighting against the British”.
Khalid filed his bail plea with the Delhi high court challenging a trial court’s order, which on March 24, dismissed his bail application. He has been charged and arrested under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) for his alleged conspiracy behind the northeast Delhi riots in February 2020.
Referring to a certain portion of the speech where Khalid had referred to Prime Minister Modi, the court held that it was not in good taste. The speech is part of the charge sheet.
Referring to the Gujarat administration’s action to build a wall in Ahmedabad in February 2020 to hide slums in February 2020 from then US President Donald Trump, Khalid had said, “Hamare desh ke pradhan mantri ko sharam aati hai … ki Donald Trump ko ye pata na chal jaye ki Hindustan mein sab changa si nahi hai… (The Prime Minister of our country is feeling ashamed… He does not want Donald Trump to know that everything is not alright in India…).”
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To this, Justice Bhatnagar said, “What is this? How can you use the word like for the Prime Minister of the country? You could have framed it in a better way. He is making the statement against the Prime Minister. Some other words could have been used for the Prime Minister. He could have stopped at.”
The bench also deemed inappropriate the word “nanga (naked)” used during Khalid’s speech. To this, Khalid’s counsel, Trideep Pais, said the term was only used metaphorically, to convey something along the lines of “the emperor’s new clothes” and to highlight the attempts by the government to hide its “lack of development” from Trump in February 2020.
“What he means rhetorically is that you are hiding the truth,” Pais told the court, wondering how such remarks could be linked to crime or exhortation to violence.
At this juncture, Justice Bhatnagar recalled that Khalid had a number of times in his speech had referred to Mahatma Gandhi and asked, “Did Mahatma Gandhi use words like these in his speeches? He is, again and again, saying that we will follow Mahatma Gandhi Ji.”
To this, Pais responded that a lot worse things had been said by Gandhi about the head of state, the Queen, under British rule.
The bench also asked what Khalid meant by the words inquilabli salam (revolutionary salute) and krantikari istiqbal (revolutionary welcome). Khalid’s counsel in response submitted a compilation of 10 documents to explain the words.
The court then said it understood what the words meant per se, but only sought the context in which they were used.
Khalid in his response said, “I used it in my speech in the context of people standing against the discriminatory law and protesting against it.” He was referring to the Union government’s enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens.
“By no stretch of the imagination, the use of the words inqalab, krantikari can be termed as a crime. It was a call for an opposition to an unjust law. He did not call for violence. I used the word as a call to boycott an unjust law,” Khalid’s response offered.
Justice Mridul then said that revolution by itself isn’t always bloodless and again sought to know the context in which Khalid used the word ‘inquilabi’. “Which is why we use it as a prefix – a bloodless revolution. So when you use the expression ‘revolution’, it is not necessarily bloodless,” added the judge.
The court listed the matter for hearing further arguments on May 23.
Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, and several others have been booked under the anti-terror law UAPA and provisions of the Indian Penal Code in the case for allegedly being the “masterminds” of the February 2020 riots, which had left 53 people dead and over 700 injured.
The violence had erupted during the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens.
The trial court had dismissed bail petitions by Khalid on March 24.
Khalid argued in his bail plea before the high court that his speech, which formed the basis for the allegations against him, did not call for violence, was not contemporaneously uploaded on YouTube, was not widely circulated, and that the allegation of commission of the offence of Section 124A (sedition) IPC or any reaction in Delhi on account of the speech was unfounded, unlikely and more than remote.
The Delhi Police, represented by Special Public Prosecutor Amit Prasad, opposed the bail plea, saying the narratives sought to be created by Khalid cannot be looked into as his defence at this stage and the trial court refused to release him by a well-reasoned order which suffered from no illegality.
Earlier, while granting time to the Delhi Police to respond to the bail plea, the high court had said that Khalid’s speech was “obnoxious, prima facie not acceptable”, and that certain statements in the speech were “offensive per se”.
Besides Khalid, activist Khalid Saifi, JNU students Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita, Jamia Coordination Committee members Safoora Zargar, former Aam Aadmi Party councillor Tahir Hussain and several others have also been booked under the stringent law in the case.
(With PTI inputs)