Friday 26 / April / 2024
New Delhi: At least six persons, including students and mediapersons, were thrashed on Monday by a group of men in lawyer's robes inside and outside a Patiala House court where the sedition case against JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar was to be heard.
A scuffle broke out before the court took up the hearing, as some men, said to be lawyers, entered the court room and allegedly started pushing out students and teachers, mostly from Jawaharlal Nehru University(JNU), and media persons, asking them to leave the premises.
"You (JNU) produce anti-nationals and terrorists. You should get out of the country. Long live India, shut down JNU," they shouted and then pushed the students and teachers out.
"When the proceedings were going on, some people wearing lawyers' gowns first started hurling abuses at us. And then suddenly some of them, without any provocation, started beating us badly. They pushed us and beat us up including women students," All India Students Federation President Waliullah Qadri told reporters.
A BJP MLA, who had come to the court complex in connection with the hearing in the defamation case filed by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, allegedly roughed up Ameeque Jamai, said to be a CPI activist.
The students and teachers refused to go out of the court room and said they have a right to attend the proceedings as it was an open court hearing.
At least three students were thrashed by the group of men. The group also began to check the identity cards of media persons and asked them also to leave the court room.
The media persons objected to their demand and refused to move out of the court room when they were attacked by the men, who accused the media persons of being JNU supporters and accused them of wrong reporting.
Two print and electronic media reporters were injured. There was heavy police deployment in the court complex, but the students alleged that they did not take any action against this group.
The policemen later drove all the students, teachers and mediapersons out of the court complex. Caught in a controversy over the purported tweet of LeT founder Hafiz Saeed that was pinned by Delhi Police in an alert over Twitter asking students not to get carried away by anti-India rhetoric, the commissioner said that a probe has been initiated into the matter.
"Don't go into whether the tweet is authentic or not. Go to the contents of the tweet. The content of the tweet was blasphemous, which could incite violence, and that is the only reason why we issued an alert.
"It is inflammatory, it incites people against lawfully establish government in India. I am surprised that people are more concerned about the (authenticity of the) tweet than its potential impact," Bassi said when asked whether the purported tweet of Saeed was genuine or fake.
"Whether Hafiz Saeed posted the tweet himself, did it go through a proxy account or whether someone else did so by using his name, is a now a matter of investigation. A probe has been initiated into it," Bassi said adding that the police are now monitoring several tweets which were made by the particular handle and other handles apparently related to that.
On Tuesday, Home Minister had claimed that the JNU university event in Delhi in memory of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru had received "support" from terror outfit Laskar-Toiba(LeT) founder Hafiz Saeed, a statement that sparked a political row with opposition parties asking him to provide evidence.
Meanwhile, Delhi Police's south district have formed a special team to track down 13 other JNU students who have been identified. The police claim that all of them were involved in anti-India sloganeering.
