TCN News
Telangana: More than 15 women’s organizations from Telangana on Friday strongly condemned the arrests of anti-CAA-NRC-NPR protestors by the Delhi Police and the Ministry of Home Affairs and demanded their release.
The recent arrest of Pinjra Tod members Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, both of who had actively participated in anti-CAA-NRC protests urged the city’s feminist groups to join hands against the government’s backing of police to serve their political motives. The group outlined that despite the Duty Magistrate at Mandoli Jail granting the two Pinjra Tod activists bail on the grounds that they were “merely protesting against NRC and CAA,” the police hasn’t released them.
“Feminist solidarities must be celebrated and defended in times of fascism,” the collective statement said and added that “police custody has been extended twice for the two Pinjra Tod members under the pretext that they would be required for interrogation in another FIR with serious charges.”
The group accused the authorities of “relentlessly targeting young women because they dared to exercise their democratic right to challenge the government and its policies.”
The network of women’s organizations who condemned the arrest spree includes Women and Transgender Organizations, Hyderabad Muslim Women’s Forum, Dalit Women’s Collective, Dalit Bahujan Front, Telangana Hijra Intersex Transgender Samithi, Chaitanya Mahila Sangham, National Workers Movement, Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch, Telangana Domestic Workers Union, Hyderabad for Feminism and others.
The group highlighted the arrests of Muslim activists since February – Gulfisha Fatima, Safoora Zargar, Meeran Haider, Shifa-Ur-Rehman, Asif Iqbal Tanha, Sharjeel Imam, Khalid Saifi and Ishrat Jahan – calling out the “disgraceful” and “spiteful” tactics of the government to resort to vindictiveness by intimidating students and young people while the country is fighting the COVID-19 pandemic and struggling with multiple crises combined with an unprecedented migrant workers misery.
The collective statement appealed for bail for Safoora who is pregnant and “faces additional risks in the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The statement said that “she was subjected to vile and misogynistic attacks online by people who enjoy proximity to the current regime,” simultaneously expressing the appalling fact that the real instigators of the communal violence in northeast Delhi “are moving scot-free, despite sufficient evidence while the people who provided relief and support to the victims are being sent to jail.”
The group said that news reports have shown hundreds of protestors, mostly from poor Muslim communities have been arrested since February for participation in anti CAA-NRC-NPR protests.
“We must keep up our struggles for defending the Constitution as well as our resistance to the CAA-NRC-NPR,” the statement said, adding that the government cannot go on arresting people merely on the basis of ideological differences.
Among the appeals against arrest, torture and detention of young scholars, the group demanded the “withdrawal of all fake charges and immediate release of students arrested for exercising their democratic right to protest.”
Favouring a fresh investigation on Delhi pogrom, the feminist collective of Hyderabad has demanded that “communal-minded police personnel, at all levels, should be sacked immediately for foisting false charges against the activists and students and aiding rioters during the northeast Delhi violence.”