Over 200 academics, authors and filmmakers, including Noam Chomsky, Mira Nair and Arundhati Roy have released a joint statement demanding the central government to free former JNU leader and activist Umar Khalid in connection with the Delhi riots case.
“We call on the Government of India to free Umar Khalid and all those falsely implicated and unjustly incarcerated for protesting against the CAA-NRC that denies equal citizenship rights and to ensure that the Delhi Police investigates the Delhi riots with impartiality under the oath they took as public servants bound by the Constitution of India,” their statement read.
Besides the signatories also include actor Ratna Pathak, Judith Butler, Admiral Ramdas, Angela Davis.
Authors like Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie , Rajmohan Gandhi, Sir Richard Jolly, GG Parekh, Partha Chatterjee, Irfan Habib, Achille Mbembe, David Hardman, Suraj Yengde, Prabhat Patnaik, Amitabh Ghosh, Homi Bhaba, Mahmood Mamdani, Tanika Sarkar, Carlo Ginzburg, Barbara Harris White and many others also signed it.
The statement further said, “We stand in solidarity and outrage, with the brave young scholar and activist Umar Khalid, arrested in New Delhi on September 14, 2020, under fabricated charges of engineering the Delhi riots in February 2020,” as per the reports.
As they claimed Khalid “used the passion of his commitment to his country, marshalled his education and his voice to join the movement for equal citizenship, against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)” that brought religion as a ‘criterion for citizenship’, and that it has no place in a secular country.