Khalid was arrested earlier this month under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in connection with the communal violence in northeast Delhi in February this year.

• The signatories include Noam Chomsky, Mira Nair, Ratna Pathak Shah, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and P Sainath

• Delhi Police Commissioner SN Shrivastava had last week said the force has documentary evidence to validate the riots case

• So far, 1,571 people have been arrested in connection with the violence irrespective of their caste or religion

New Delhi: Over 200 academics, authors and filmmakers, including Noam Chomsky and Mira Nair from the United States, have put out a joint statement demanding the Central government to release former JNU leader and activist Umar Khalid in connection with the Delhi riots case.
Through the statement released on Thursday, they urged the Centre to free “all those falsely implicated and unjustly incarcerated for protesting against the CAA-NRC”.
“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.
The signatories also include actor Ratna Pathak Shah, authors Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, and journalist and social activist P Sainath.
“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,” the statement further said, news agency PTI reported.
It claimed that 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.
Khalid was arrested earlier this month under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in a case pertaining to communal violence in northeast Delhi in February this year.
Delhi Police Commissioner SN Shrivastava had last week said that the force has documentary and scientific evidence to validate its case in connection with the communal clashes, adding that so far 1,571 people have been arrested irrespective of their caste or religion.
“Delhi Police are serving the oath and the Constitution with conviction, integrity and sensitivity, without fear of any self-proclaimed ‘true patriots’ or favour towards any class, creed or community,” Srivastava said is a response to former IPS officer Julio Ribeiro who had questioned the Delhi Police’s probe into the matter.