The Constitutional Conduct Group of retired bureaucrats has expressed distress at the prosecution of Ashoka University associate professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad.
The group said in a statement: “We are greatly distressed by the grave criminal charges levelled against Ashoka University professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad and his subsequent arrest…. We regard the criminal charges against Professor Ali Khan as outrageous and absurd.
“It cannot be a crime to seek justice for victims of lynching and bulldozer demolitions, or to call for peace and restraint. It is noteworthy that despite the orders of the Supreme Court for taking suo motu action, even rampant hate speeches that openly call for violence and ethnic cleansing of Indian Muslims have rarely attracted these criminal charges of disloyalty to the nation and fostering religious hate.”
Commenting on the Supreme Court’s observations, they said: “But, with due respect, we are dismayed by some of the comments made by the bench and the conditions of bail that were laid down. The bench made mystifying allusions to ‘dog-whistling’ in the professor’s tweets, criticising his ‘choice of words’ and charging him with seeking ‘cheap publicity’.
“The bench ordered the surrender of the professor’s passport and the appointment of a Special Investigation Team to ‘holistically understand the complexity of the phraseology employed and for proper appreciation of some of the expressions used in the two posts’. It is beyond our comprehension how three police officers could be equipped to extract hidden meanings from a post written in elegant and straightforward English.”
They concluded by saying: “We are quite disturbed by the deviation from defence of free speech, which has been upheld by the Supreme Court in numerous cases…. The perils and consequences of suppressing free speech by unjust application of criminal law can be profoundly corrosive for a society.”
The 79 signatories include former foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon, former Delhi lieutenant governor Najeeb Jung and former director-general of police Julio Ribeiro.
