A Bihar court has got a sedition FIR registered against nine eminent personalities for an open letter they and others wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July condemning the rise in lynchings and communal violence, the action raising fresh charges of intolerance.
Forty-five unidentified people have also been mentioned as defendants in the case, registered in Muzaffarpur on the orders of chief judicial magistrate Surya Kant Tiwari on a plea from local advocate Sudhir Kumar Ojha, who accused them of tarnishing the country’s image.
The nine named are filmmakers Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Aparna Sen and Mani Ratnam, actors Soumitra Chatterjee, Konkona Sen Sharma and Revathi, classical singer Shubha Mudgal and historian Ramachandra Guha.
Court documents accessed by this newspaper show that the accused have been booked under penal code sections 124A (sedition), 153B (imputations, assertions prejudicial to national integration), 160 (committing affray), 290 (public nuisance), 297 (trespassing on burial places with an intention to hurt religious feelings) and 504 (insult with intent to provoke breach of peace). The maximum punishment under these sections is three years in jail.
Ironically, FIR No. 673/19 was lodged at Sadar police station on October 2 — the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, an advocate of peace and communal harmony.
Altogether 49 eminent citizens had signed the open letter, citing the “lynchings of Muslims, Dalits and other minorities” and the conversion of the “Jai Shri Ram” chant into a “provocative war cry”, and questioning the lack of action from Modi.
Reacting to the news, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi said: “Everybody knows what is going on in the country. It is not a secret. The whole world knows it. We are moving towards an authoritarian state. It is pretty clear. Anybody who says anything against the Prime Minister, anybody who raises anything against the government, is put in jail or is attacked. Media is crushed.”Asked about the long gap between the letter, written towards the end of July, and the registration of the FIR, Ojha said he had filed his plea on July 27 and the court had passed orders after following due process.
“I felt the letter was intended to tarnish the image of our country and malign the Prime Minister and his effective style of functioning. It was against humanity,” Ojha, 50, told The Telegraph.
“As the letter was aimed at increasing disharmony in society and divide our nation, I filed a case. Unfortunately, I could give only nine names. The other 40 writers and five others who supported them in the media have been bracketed as ‘unidentified’ in the FIR.”
Ojha said: “The court has asked the police to investigate and submit a chargesheet by November 11.”
A sub-inspector, Hare Ram Paswan, is the investigating officer.
Ojha, who began practising in Muzaffarpur in 1996, has filed 745 public interest cases.Among these are cases filed against Priyanka Gandhi for questioning the court judgment discharging the accused in the Pehlu Khan lynching case, against Raj Thackeray and Arvind Kejriwal for the statements about people from Bihar and Digvijay Singh for his statement on communal issues.
Surprised: Adoor
Adoor Gopalakrishnan told reporters in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, on Friday: “It (the letter to the Prime Minister) is not a statement against anyone, or the government. That letter was written when we saw injustice in the country. It was written to bring the matter to the Prime Minister’s attention. It was a very politely written letter. It was written to seek his attention and find a solution.
“Not one of those who signed the letter is a politician. All of them are from various cultural fields.” He continued: “We wrote that letter in complete belief that democracy is in place.”
He added: “I am surprised such a case was admitted by a court.”
