Umar Khalid is innocent, says Digvijaya Singh

Claiming that jailed former JNU scholar Umar Khalid is “innocent”, Congress Rajya Sabha member Digvijaya Singh on Monday alleged that the 2020 Delhi riots accused is facing “grave injustice” and he should be immediately released from jail.

The former Madhya Pradesh chief minister wrote the comments on a facebook post, while sharing an article about Khalid.

Advertisement

Singh’s comments stirred a national political debate, drawing sharp criticism from the BJP.

Digvijaya Singh said that ‘Umar Khalid is a PhD scholar, and not an anti-national by any standards’. ‘He is facing grave injustice. He must be released from jail immediately’, Singh further wrote.

Student activist and former research scholar at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Umar Khalid was arrested on 13 September 2020 in connection with the communal riots that took place in Delhi in February 2020. He has been in jail since then and has not been granted regular bail.

Singh also accused the BJP and RSS of continuously conspiring to falsely implicate Muslims in conspiracies, which they only created. In another post, he claimed that four persons arrested in connection with writing ‘I Love Muhammad’ on the walls of temples at Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh are all Hindus. The names of the arrested accused are Dilip, Akash, Jishant, and Abhishek.

Reacting sharply to Digvijaya Singh’s comments, BJP MLA from Bhopal Rameshwar Sharma alleged that he always shows sympathy towards people who are against the country. “Where is Digvijaya Singh’s concern about Hindustan and its people,” he asked.

He charged Digvijaya Singh with calling terrorists like ‘Osama Bin Laden’ as ‘Osama ji’ and ‘Afzal Guru’ as ‘Afzal Guru Ji’. “Digvijaya Singh has great reverence for terrorists,” Sharma averred.

“If Digvijaya Singh has no trust in the country’s judiciary, then he should immediately shift to Pakistan”, he contended.