The Telegraph – Anti-CAA protests: No clean chit yet for cops in Jamia action

The police had been caught on camera brutally assaulting youngsters at the university to quell the demonstrations against the Centre’s new citizenship regime

New Delhi – India, 23 August 2020. Delhi High Court on Friday said a report of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) had suggested that police did not handle themselves “professionally” while dealing with anti-CAA protests at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University last December, and that none had been given a “clean chit”.

“The NHRC says law-and-order problem, but it also says inculcate professionalism in the police. The report indicates that the incident was not handled professionally,” a bench of Chief Justice D N Patel and Justice Prateek Jalan said.

The police had been caught on camera brutally assaulting youngsters at Jamia to quell the protests against the Centre’s new citizenship regime, with some videos showing cops hitting unarmed boys with batons inside a library.

The court’s observations were in response to the contention of additional solicitor-general Aman Lekhi that the rights panel had found that there had been a law-and-order situation at Jamia and so police entry into the campus was legitimate.

The law officer pointed out that the report had only mentioned that there were individual instances of police excesses and that it did not say that the action as a whole was unwarranted. Lekhi added that the commission had also left it to the police, not any outside agency, to inquire into the individual instances of transgression by its officers.

To this, the bench remarked: “That is fine. But the report cannot be read as a clean chit being given to anyone either.”

The high court was hearing a batch of petitions that have alleged that the police and paramilitary forces had used ruthless and excessive force on students at the university.

The pleas have sought the formation of a special investigation team or a commission of inquiry to look into the violence at Jamia last December during the students’ protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA).

Opposing the petitioners’ allegations, Lekhi argued that while they claim that the police action was unwarranted, the NHRC report does not say so. He said that the police action as a whole was “not disproportionate” to the violence on the campus and only in some isolated instances had disproportionate force been used.

However, inquiry into these isolated instances have been left to the police by the NHRC and this indicates that the agency can be trusted, contrary to what the petitioners are claiming, Lekhi argued.

He said that while the petitioners had claimed that the protests were peaceful, the NHRC report refers to it as “violent”.

The law officer iterated his argument during the previous hearing on 14 August that the police had entered the university to restore order, which had been disrupted by incidents of arson and destruction of public property during the students’ protests.

Lekhi will continue his arguments on 28 August.

https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/anti-caa-protests-no-clean-chit-yet-for-cops-in-jamia-action/cid/1789835

The Print – Dear Amit Shah, stop distorting history to explain your failures today: Shashi Tharoor

Home Minister Amit Shah saying new citizenship law was necessary because Congress divided India on religious grounds shows he learned nothing in history class.

Shashi Tharoor

New Delhi – India, 17 December 2019. The protests erupting over the Citizenship Amendment Act in the Jamia Millia Islamia University, across the northeast and elsewhere in India is the direct fallout of the BJP’s malicious reading of India’s history and plan to make the country a Hindutva version of Pakistan.

But the immediate crisis should not obscure the fundamentals. We are now accustomed, alas, in our irremediably tedious political controversies, to seeing history used as cannon fodder by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Given that the BJP is determined to drag us back to the 16th century, I suppose we should be grateful that currently, it is restricting itself to the 20th century.

But Home Minister Amit Shah’s astonishing assertion in Parliament, in a response to me, that the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), now a law, was necessary only because the Congress had divided India on religious grounds in 1947, is such a breathtaking piece of effrontery that it deserves a response.

My initial reaction was that Amit Shah must not have been paying attention in school during history class: had he never heard of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the “two-nation theory”, or the Muslim League’s Pakistan Resolution of 1940?

Could he seriously believe that Partition wasn’t the demand of the League, voted for by a significant plurality of India’s Muslims in 1946?

Did he actually consider that Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian National Congress, the flag-bearer for six decades of a united nationalist movement, a party that had been led multiple times by Muslims and actually served under a Muslim president (Maulana Azad) in the crucial period from 1940 to 1945, wished to divide India on religious lines?

But then, I also came to realise that it didn’t really matter what Amit Shah believed: it only mattered that he had said it. And in saying it, the BJP, hero-worshippers of V D Savarkar who first propounded the two-nation theory as president of the Hindu Mahasabha before Jinnah seized upon the same idea, had continued its tiresome political tactic of ascribing to the Congress party responsibility for any error, tragedy or event that had cast a blight upon India. Partition was bad, ergo blame it on the Congress.

Ironically enough, Amit Shah found unlikely allies in the most improbable place, across the border , where my denunciation of his ruling BJP for ushering in a Hindutva version of Pakistan in India was fiercely condemned by Pakistani liberals. Asad Rahim Khan in Dawn and Yasser Latif Hamdani in ThePrint both criticised me by name for venturing to suggest that Partition was Jinnah’s fault.

In their telling, the man who had once been hailed by Sarojini Naidu as the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity was blameless: it was Hindu illiberalism, and Gandhiji’s use of Hindu religious concepts to stir the masses, that led Jinnah to demand a separate country.

https://theprint.in/opinion/dear-amit-shah-stop-distorting-history-to-explain-your-failures-today-shashi-tharoor/336326/