Digvijaya Singh, a senior Congress leader who joined families of jailed activists, including former JNU academic Umar Khalid, said on Tuesday that bail is rarely granted when the victims are Muslim.
The 77-year-old politician was referring to a recent Supreme Court opinion which said “bail is the rule and prison the exception.”
Addressing a panel discussion organised by the Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR) to mark four years since the arrest of anti-CAA-NRC protesters, Digvijaya Singh criticised the RSS.
He likened the RSS’s alleged targeting of Muslims in India to the persecution of Jews in Germany under Hitler’s regime.
Singh expressed solidarity with the jailed activists and claimed to be from an area that the RSS calls its “nursery”.
“I have always known them closely. They have no belief in democracy or the Constitution. They have targeted Muslims the way Hitler targeted the Jews…The way this ideology has permeated at all levels is dangerous for democracy,” PTI quoted Digvijay Singh as saying.
Digvijaya Singh commented that the RSS is an unregistered organisation with no formal membership or accounts and that it disavows individuals if caught “as in the case of Nathuram Godse”.
“Bail is the rule and prison is the exception. So why is bail the exception for Muslims?” Singh asked.
Meanwhile, SQR Ilyas, father of Umar Khalid, expressed concern over the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act under which Khalid and others were arrested.
“Be it Umar, Gulfisha or those arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case… these draconian laws enacted by Parliament are meant to curb terrorism but are being used against common citizens. The BJP introduced POTA and the Congress repealed it but then brought back all its provisions under UAPA,” Ilyas said.
He questioned why no action was being taken against police officials for a man who was acquitted after years of trial and also criticised the Delhi Police for referring to witnesses in the case as “Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta”.
Dipankar Bhattacharya, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation Movement, said the activists currently in jail would one day be recognised as “fighters for democracy”.
“Those arrested during the Emergency were considered warriors of democracy and that is still the case today,” he said.
He also said that the anti-CAA/NRC protest at Shaheen Bagh was not just a protest against the citizenship law but an “equal citizenship movement”.
With PTI input
