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Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita, members of Delhi’s Pinjra Tod collective, are currently facing multiple charges filed by the Delhi Police which inter alia, include rioting with deadly weapons, assaulting a public official and attempt to murder.
The accused were first arrested in connection with initial FIR (No. 59/2020) but police custody was denied and they were granted bail by the court citing the peaceful nature of the sit-in protest at Jafarabad against the Citizenship Amendment Act and on account of the women being ‘educated and well rooted in society’. The court did not find evidence of any involvement in violence by the two women found the charges to be unfounded.
Subsequently, within minutes of the bail being granted, a remand order in connection with a separate FIR (No. 50/2020) was passed and the two women were arrested again and are now being kept in police remand for 2 days. The charges include the non bailable offence of Section 353 of the IPC.
The police claimed in its statement that the two women were involved in ‘anti national activities’, with no further elaboration on the same, and that it was necessary to interrogate both the accused to ‘unearth the conspiracy’ behind their acts and thus the arrest was made.
Concerned activists and the counsel of the accused have raised concerns as to the malafide nature of the police’s charges, especially considering that the court categorically said that the accused did not engage in any violent act, and that the charges in the original FIR were effectively rendered baseless. Activists have also said that the Police is clearly taking advantage of the nationwide lockdown to clamp down on dissenters, as people cannot gather and protest against these acts of police tyranny. Moreover, the charges framed against the accused are extreme and seem illogical, especially considering the fact that the incident in questioned occurred at a peaceful sit in protest at Jafarabad in Delhi.
Incidents like these highlight the vindictive nature of police action in the country, who often serve the purposes of their political masters, and invariably become tools of state oppression. In the aftermath of the anti CAA protests, the police have undertaken a targeted operation against prominent dissenters against the state, and regularly arrested them and found wats to keep them in custody.
These women are part of a women’s rights collective based in Delhi’s colleges, which aims at achieving equal rights for women within the student community, and organize peaceful strikes and protests for those very objectives. Their systematic targeting is a worrying sign and indicative of the oppressive nature of the police in the country.
Yet, as the legal community, we must continue to repose faith in our legal systems and hope that the court stands by its earlier decision that the women were merely protesting and their actions did not warrant an arrest and were not illegal. The courts also have an incumbent duty on them to hold the police accountable for their malafide intentions in this present case.
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