Those booked by police under draconian laws: Kanhaiya Kumar 

Delhi government granted sanction to prosecute Left leader and former student leader Kanhaiya Kumar in the JNU sedition case on February 28 this year. The Delhi government had kept the file for the prosecution of the former JNUSU president and other former students of the university for more than a year.

Kanhaiya was accused of raising alleged “anti-national” slogans at the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus on February 9, 2016, during a protest action against the death sentence handed out to Afzal Guru, a convict in the 2002 Parliament attack case.

A Delhi Police charge sheet filed on January 14, 2019, names 10 JNU students as the main accused, including Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, Anirban Bhattacharya and seven Kashmiri students.

The sanction has been granted nearly eleven months after the court on April 6, 2019, asked the AAP government to take a decision with a reasonable timeframe-- three months--while noting that the delay was leading to a violation of the due process of law.

Under the Code of Criminal Procedure, investigating agencies have to take the approval or sanction of the state government while filing charge sheets in sedition cases.

Delhi government had then told court that it needed more time to assess if the speeches made by Kanhaiya Kumar and nine others were seditious in nature and said it would decide within a month after receiving the opinion of its standing counsel. It also accused the Delhi Police of filing the charge sheet in the 2016 incident in a “secret and hasty manner”.