CPIML strongly condemns the decision by the AAP-ruled Delhi Government to give sanction to the Delhi Police to prosecute activists Kanhaiya Kumar, Anirban, Umar Khalid, Aqib Hussain, Mujeeb Hussain Gattoo, Muneer Hussain Gattoo, Umair Gul, Rayees Rasool, Basharat Ali, and Khalid Bashir Bhat on charges of sedition. The students are being booked for slogans allegedly raised in the JNU campus at a Kashmir Solidarity poetry reading in 2016. It has been very clear since 2016 that the Delhi Police has no evidence connecting the sloganeering with the students. Moreover, Supreme Court rulings have established that slogans, no matter how provocative, can never constitute sedition.

At a time when BJP Governments all over India are slapping sedition cases on anyone critical of the CAA NPR NRC, and the Delhi Police is refusing to arrest BJP leaders calling for genocide of dissenters and minorities, the AAP Government headed by Arvind Kejriwal has decided to give sanction to the Delhi Police to prosecute students for sedition!

This decision by the AAP Government is all the more shameful given that the Delhi Government's standing counsel Rahul Mehra and Home Department had advised against giving sanction to prosecute, maintaining that there was no evidence to support charges of sedition.

Sedition is a draconian law of colonial origin, which should be scrapped as unconstitutional. Its only purpose in independent India is to harass dissenting voices. There has never been a conviction under the sedition law - the process itself is the punishment, allowing governments and media a chance to demonise dissenters as "anti national".

CPIML stands in solidarity with all the students and citizens facing sedition charges - including the ten JNU students in the 2016 case, as well as various young persons in JNU, Mumbai and Karnataka more recently.

Central Committee
CPIML