Eminent personalities from the country’s filmdom on Sunday accused police of “betraying the civil rights of citizens”, the open allegation coming after the arrest of two Jamia Millia Islamia scholars who had protested against the new citizenship matrix in February.
The statement, signed by 29 actors, producers, directors and comedians, did not name the two students.
But the immediate trigger appeared to be the April 10 arrest of Safoora Zargar, an MPhil student of sociology, and Meeran Haider, a PhD scholar in management studies who was picked up this month during the lockdown.
Activists say Safoora is pregnant.
Sunday’s statement came six days after a group of academics and activists had named the two research scholars while accusing Delhi police of “retaliatory revengeful action” against those who had taken part in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act.
Safoora and Meeran, who heads the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s youth wing in the capital, have been arrested in several cases related to the February riots in Delhi.
Meeran has also been charged with alleged violence at a protest against the citizenship law in Khureji Khas. Two others — former Congress councillor Ishrat Jahan and rights activist and Aam Aadmi Party supporter Khalid Saifi — are already in custody in this case on charges of attempt to murder, rioting, damaging property and Arms Act violations.
The statement by the film personalities ripped into what they called an attempt to weave a “twisted” fairy tale.
“In a twisted fairy tale that the Delhi Police is trying to weave, these activists are now being implicated in cases related to the communal violence in Delhi that took place in February. A riot in which the minorities suffered the maximum damage both in terms of lives and livelihoods, has now become a pretext for the Delhi Police to further witch-hunt activists, most of whom also come from the minority community,” it said.
Among those who signed the statement were producers Vinta Nanda and Kushan Nandy, directors Mahesh Bhatt, Anurag Kashyap, Vishal Bharadwaj, Hansal Mehta, Aparna Sen, Onir and Neeraj Ghaywan, actors Ratna Pathak Shah, Nandita Das, Sushant Singh, Zeeshan Ayyub, Konkona Sensharma and Vinay Shukla, standup comedians Abish Mathew, Mallika Dua and Andre Borges, and musicians Vishal Dadlani and Ankur Tewari.
The signatories called the CAA “a bigoted law” and demanded the release of students and other activists, while accusing Delhi police of “betraying the civil rights of citizens”.
The statement added: “The lockdown cannot be a lockdown of the rights of citizens, and must not be abused by the authorities in this manner…. Making several people travel to police stations every day and then throwing some of them to jails also defeats the purpose of the lockdown and makes a mockery of social distancing. At a time when various governments are releasing under-trials from jail to relieve the pressure from the prisons and restrict chances of contamination, the Delhi police is pushing students and activists into jail.”