A Delhi court on Saturday allowed the police to withdraw the prosecution of former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student leader Shehla Rashid in connection with a 2019 sedition case over her tweets about the Indian Army, news agency PTI reported. Rashid had faced legal action over a series of tweets posted on August 18, 2019, in which she alleged that Army personnel had tortured four men in Jammu and Kashmir’s Shopian district, placing a microphone next to them “so that the entire area could hear them scream, and be terrorised.”
The allegations were based on accounts from individuals who had left Kashmir after the Valley was placed under lockdown following the revocation of Article 370 on August 5, 2019.
The Delhi Police had registered a sedition case against Rashid in September 2019 based on a complaint by Supreme Court lawyer Alakh Alok Srivastava. The case was lodged under charges of “promoting enmity between different groups” and “acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony,” news agency ANI reported.
The Indian Army had strongly refuted Rashid’s claims, terming them “baseless and unverified.” The Delhi Lieutenant Governor’s office had stated that her tweets aimed at “creating religious fault lines” in Jammu and Kashmir.
In 2023, Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena had granted sanction to prosecute Rashid, following a proposal sent by the Delhi Police and supported by the Home Department. According to The Indian Express, the Home Department had argued that “the nature of the case, location to which the tweets refer, and making false allegations against the Army makes it a serious issue.” The department had also asserted that Rashid’s remarks warranted prosecution under Section 153A of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (formerly IPC), which pertains to offences against public order.
Case ‘Frivolous, Politically Motivated’: Shehla Rashid
Rashid had dismissed the case against her as “frivolous, politically motivated and a pathetic attempt” to silence her. “In my tweets, I have clearly mentioned that these are based on information received from people in the state,” she had said in 2019.
Speaking to Scroll.in, she had claimed that the information about the alleged torture was relayed to her by a person who had travelled from Shopian to Delhi. While declining to disclose the location, she had stated, “Time will prove who is right and who is wrong. I am not lying. If anything, this should make the government more alert to avoid such abuse of human rights.”
Responding to questions about the lack of verification, Rashid had argued that restrictions on the press and communication in Kashmir at the time made it impossible to independently confirm the claims. “How can you verify when the government has shut down newspapers and all other communications? It is impossible to verify and that is not my fault,” she had said.
Asserting her role as an activist, Rashid had added, “I believe it to be the truth. These are real stories of real people. And my purpose is to highlight them without any exaggeration.”