The Delhi government asked the court on Wednesday to provide it with a month’s time to decide whether to grant sanction to prosecute former JNU students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar and others in the 2016 JNU sedition case. Responding to the plea, Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Deepak Sherawat directed the AAP government to file a “proper reply”, providing a definite time-frame.
The court had asked Delhi Police on February 6 to procure sanctions by February 28. On January 19, it had rebuked the police for filing a charge sheet in the 2016 case without the approval of the Delhi government. According to the DCP of Special Cell of Delhi Police, Pramod Kushwaha, the agency had already sent a request to the Delhi government requesting permission and added that the permission was an administrative action and the charge sheet can be filed without that.
In February this year, the court had come down hard against the AAP government claiming that it is deliberately delaying the process of granting the sanction to prosecute Kanhaiya Kumar and others, accused of sedition.
After being reprimanded for delaying the process, the Delhi government has now once again resorted to dilatory tactics, soliciting another month’s time to allow its permission on the prosecution of those accused in the sedition case, just a day after Congress released its manifesto. Yesterday, Congress had released its manifesto for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections 2019 with the scrapping of sedition law as one of its central promises, should it comes to power.
The AAP government in Delhi has been showing a dubious inclination towards the accused in the JNU sedition case as it has been repeatedly trying to derail or delay it. Earlier, the Delhi government had issued a show-cause notice to the bureaucrat who had cleared the file of the case. It has been delaying its sanction for months now. In February, three BJP MLAs were marshaled out of the Delhi assembly for demanding the AAP government’s sanction on the case.
