Delhi Police Arrests Sharjeel Imam, JNU Student Accused Of 'Sedition'

Sharjeel Imam, a student of the Jawaharlal Nehru University , was arrested by the Delhi police on Tuesday for his speech at Aligarh Muslim University on January 16. 

“We have arrested Sharjeel Imam from Jehanabad,” said Rajesh Deo, deputy commissioner of police, Crime Branch told PTI. 

Raids had been carried out across Delhi, Mumbai and Patna after five teams of the police were deployed to look for him. 

Imam, the research scholar in JNU, had a spate of police cases registered against him after a video of him was widely circulated online.

Earlier in the day, a brother of Sharjeel Imam was picked up by police in a fresh attempt to trace him.

Police had raided his ancestral home on Sunday as it went hunting for him. He is likely to be produced before a Bihar court where police will seek his remand for questioning. It is not yet clear whether he will be questioned in Bihar or taken to the national capital.

A graduate in computer science from IIT-Mumbai, Imam had shifted to Delhi for pursuing research at the Centre for Historical Studies at the JNU. He was slapped with a sedition case after a video of his purported speech went viral on social media where he was heard speaking about “cutting off” Assam and the northeast from the rest of India.

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Sedition cases were registered against him in Assam and Uttar Pradesh for his speech at the Aligarh Muslim University. In the video Imam reportedly said “cut off Assam from India” However, he later denied this. 

He told The Indian Express, “In that context, I said you have to block roads going to Assam. It was basically a call for chakka jam…They can put cases on me by editing these clips, but there is nothing that they can prove.” 

The Indian Express report had quoted Imam as saying in the video, ”“If we have five lakh people with us, we can cut off the Northeast from India. If not permanently, for one or two months. Put rubble on tracks and roads…. Assam aur India katke alag ho jaaye, tabhi ye humari baat sunenge (Once Assam is cut off, then only they will listen to us)… We can do that because the Chicken’s Neck corridor (connecting Northeast to rest of India) is dominated by Muslims.”