A court here has allowed Delhi police to withdraw a 2019 sedition case against former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU) vice-president Shehla Rashid Shora for her tweets on the army.
Chief metropolitan magistrate Anuj Kumar Singh on Thursday permitted the Delhi police’s application seeking to close the case against Shehla.
The application claimed that lieutenant governor V.K. Saxena had withdrawn his sanctions to prosecute Shehla on the recommendation of a screening committee.
“Lt Governor, Delhi has approved the recommendation of the Screening Committee...,” the application said. The LG granted the approval on December 23 last year.
Once a vocal critic of the Centre’s decision to abrogate Article 370, which gave Jammu and Kashmir its special status, Shehla later praised the Narendra Modi-led government for improving the human rights situation in the Valley.
The case against Shehla dates back to August 18, 2019, when she had allegedly tweeted about the armed forces torturing Kashmiri people. The allegations were denied by the army as baseless and unverified. The FIR against Shehla was registered in 2019 based on a complaint by advocate Alakh Alok Srivastava.
According to the complaint, Shehla had tweeted about the armed forces barging into homes at night, ransacking them and picking up boys. “In Shopian, 4 men were called into the Army camp and “interrogated” (tortured). A mic was kept close to them so that the entire area could hear them scream, and be terrorized. This created an environment of fear in the entire area,” she had tweeted.
Srivastava said Shehla’s claims were baseless and concocted and she was deliberately spreading fake news to malign the army’s image.
The Delhi police had booked Shehla under IPC sections relating to sedition and promoting enmity.
Shehla emerged as a prominent face of students’ resistance against the BJP-led Centre following a controversy over a JNU event in 2016 that led to the arrest of then JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar and others.
Shehla was a member of CPIML-Liberation’s AISA until 2019 when she became one of the founders of the short-lived Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Movement, led by IAS officer Shah Faesal.
She was in Bengaluru on a research project when almost the entire political leadership of Kashmir was arrested following the abrogation of Article 370. She helped to prepare a petition that was filed in the Supreme Court seeking the restoration of the provision.
Faesal and Shehla withdrew their petitions shortly after Faesal was reinstated as an IAS officer in 2023, three years after he resigned and joined politics in Jammu and Kashmir.
Later that year, Shehla appeared in a podcast with ANI editor Smita Prakash where she praised Modi and publicly changed her stance on Article 370. However, she maintained that former JNU student Umar Khalid — who was briefly in jail in connection with the 2016 JNU sedition row and is now awaiting trial for the 2020 Delhi riots conspiracy case — “did not advocate terrorism” in 2016.
Shehla has since been seen at several government events.