Yechury has come under the police scanner in an investigation that has aimed to draw direct links between peaceful CAA protesters and rioters.
On Friday afternoon, The Wire reported that intellectuals and leaders from political parties, including Yechury, Swaraj Abhiyan leader Yogendra Yadav, Delhi University professor Apoorvanand, Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Jayati Ghosh, lawyer Mahmood Pracha, Bhim Army chief Chandrasekhar, and documentary filmmaker Rahul Roy, are under the Delhi police’s scanner.
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Responding to the allegation that he gave a speech to “provoke and mobilise” the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protestors at the Jafrabad sit-in, Yechury tweeted, “Delhi Police is under the Centre and Home Ministry. Its illegitimate, illegal actions are a direct outcome of the politics of BJP’s top leadership.”
Asking the news agency PTI to withdraw a tweet which notified without any elaboration that the Delhi police named him and others as “co-conspirators”, Yogendra Yadav said, “This is factually incorrect report, hope @PTI_News withdraws it. Supplementary chargesheet does NOT mention me as co-conspirator, or even as accused. One passing reference to me and Yechury, in an unauthenticated police statement (not admissible in court) by one accused.”
He also tweeted a page of the chargesheet where his name has been referred.
The names of these personalities emerged in the disclosure statement of Gulfisha Fathima, who had recently associated herself with the women’s collective Pinjra Tod. The statement is a part of the supplementary charge sheet the Delhi police filed in FIR 50/20, against Fathima and two founding members of Pinjra Tod, Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal.
The supplementary charge sheet, which largely probes the activists’ role in Jafrabad communal violence on February 23 itself, makes a series of wide-ranging connections between politically-varied groups and individuals to illustrate their purported complicity in the February violence at Delhi.
Attached with it are two identical disclosure statements of Kalita and Narwal, in which the police claims that Ghosh, Apoorvanand, and Roy mentored them to militantly protest against CAA to malign and dislodge the Union government. Curiously, in some pages of these ‘disclosure statements’, one can see that Kalita and Narwal have written ‘I refuse to sign’.
Screenshot of so-called disclosure statements by Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita. Narwal has written ‘Refuse to sign’ and where Kalita has written ‘I refuse to sign’, it has been crossed out.
Fathima’s disclosure statement, on the other hand, alleged that leaders like Yechury, Yadav, Bhim Army chief Chandrasekhar and others planned their speeches at the Jafrabad sit-in to provoke and “a feeling of discontent” among Muslims against CAA.
Apoorvanand, responding to the allegation, had told The Wire earlier that the Delhi police probe into the riots is strangely similar to the Bhima Koregaon case in which several public intellectuals, professionals, and activists who have been critical of the Union government have been arrested. He said that the investigations were an ideologically-charged, unprofessional, and a ‘scripted’ exercise to “criminalise anti-CAA protests and protestors.”