The Indian students in jail for ‘celebrating’ a Pakistan cricket victory

The students have been charged with ‘sedition’, a colonial era law that critics fear is being used to crush dissent and free speech. Sravasti Dasgupta reports

Pakistan’s captain Babar Azam plays a shot during the ICC mens Twenty20 World Cup cricket match between India and Pakistan on 24 October 2021 in Dubai (AFP/Getty)

For nearly 150 days, three young Kashmiri students have been languishing in a prison cell in northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state.

Their alleged crime? Celebrating India losing a cricket match to arch rivals Pakistan in October last year.

Arsheed Yousuf, Inayat Altaf and Showkat Ahmad Ganai are all in their early twenties, and attended the Raja Balwant Singh Engineering Technical College in Agra. They were arrested for sharing what the authorities have described as “anti-India” messages on WhatsApp after the match, a T20 World Cup fixture on 24 October which Pakistan won by 10 wickets.

The students have been charged with sedition, a colonial era law that critics say is being increasingly used by prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to quell protests and crackdown on dissent. They are slated to appear at a bail hearing next week, though this has already been postponed several times.

The three are also facing charges of “promoting enmity”, intent to cause harm as well as cyber terrorism.

Speaking to The Independent, Madhuvan Dutt, the defence lawyer for the students, says the sedition law “applies to those who cause disaffection to the government of India”.

“The cricket teams of India and Pakistan are not the governments,” he says. “In a democracy, disagreeing [with] or condemning a government is allowed as long as you don’t attack the constitutional infrastructure of the government.

“Commenting on the victory or loss of a cricket team is not grounds for sedition [charges],” he said.

Although never gone entirely, tensions between nuclear-armed neighbours India and Pakistan have been especially high since a flashpoint of violence in February 2019, which culminated in Pakistan shooting down an Indian fighter jet and capturing its pilot.

These political tensions also manifest themselves in sport between the two nations, and after the match in Dubai things quickly turned ugly as attacks against Kashmiri students were reported from colleges in several parts of north India. Indian-administered Kashmir is the only Muslim-majority territory in India and home to a violent separatist movement that would rather see it be part of Pakistan or a nation in its own right.

Indian player Mohammad Shami, who is Muslim, was also the subject of Islamophobic attacks.

Nasir Khuehami, national spokesperson for the Jammu and Kashmir student’s association, says that even before the match, instructions were issued to Kashmiri students not to celebrate if Pakistan won.

“We said control your emotions, [your] career is more important than an India Pakistan match,” he recalls. “We asked them not to put out any provocative statements on social media which may land them in trouble.”

Soon after the match ended, Khuehami says he started receiving calls reporting incidents of violence in several colleges across northern India. Later the organisation was told that three students had n beearrested in Agra and charged with sedition for their post-match celebrations.

The three students, all recipients of a government scholarship scheme, were arrested after a criminal complaint known as a First Information Report (FIR) was lodged by Gaurav Rajawat, Agra secretary of the Hindu nationalist BJP’s student wing — the Bharatiya Janta Yuva Morcha (BJYM).

According to Rajawat’s FIR, the three had used slogans including “Pakistan Zindabad” (Long live Pakistan) and “Bharat Mata tere tukde honge” (Mother India will be broken into pieces) on their WhatsApp accounts.

Rajawat tells The Independent he acted as soon as he found out about the WhatsApp stories.

“I saw the screenshots of the stories and the chats where they are saying India is not my country, Kashmir is my country,” he says. “These students were recipients of PM’s scholarship for J&K students, which means they were studying on Indian taxpayers’ money.

“You cannot study on our money and raise slogans against Indians. We will not allow that.”

Rajawat says proudly that not only did he lodge the police complaint against the students, resulting in their arrest on 27 October, he also raised the issue with the state’s chief minister Yogi Adityanath — a firebrand Hindu monk some tout as a potential prime ministerial successor to Modi.

The following day, Adityanath in a tweet issued a warning to those who celebrated Pakistan’s victory in the match. “Those celebrating Pakistan’s win will be charged with sedition,” the tweet said.

The charge of sedition was only added against the students after this tweet, according to Dutt. “In the initial FIR, the charge of sedition was not there,” he says.

The same day, the students were also suspended from their college as BJYM protests continued, forcing authorities to close the campus.

“College authorities had acted once the matter came to their notice on Monday [25 October]. These three students from Kashmir were questioned and written clarification was sought regarding exchange of anti-national chats on social media after the match result. The trio was also suspended from the hostel as part of disciplinary action,” college chief proctor Ashish Shukla was quoted as saying at the time in a media statement to the Hindustan Times.

Approached by The Independent, now that his students have spent almost five months in jail over the incident, Shukla refused to comment. “We only know that they are in jail,” he says. “We don’t know anything beyond that.”

Dr Pankaj Gupta, director (administration) of the college, also refused to comment.

With the students’ futures hanging in the balance, their families say they are slowly losing hope.

“It has been five months and there has been no movement in the case. They are just children,” says Yousuf’s uncle Bilal Ahmed.

The families say that the news of the arrest only reached them two days later, ironically through social media. Since then it has been a struggle to keep up the legal battle to get them out of jail — an uphill task from the onset, as lawyers’ organisations in Agra all refused to represent them in such a communally charged case.

It was only after the Jammu & Kashmir Students Association’s intervention that a lawyer was found.

When the students were presented in court for their first judicial remand following their arrest, crowds including legal professionals abused them. Videos widely circulated on social media show men, some in lawyers’ gowns, heckling the students while chanting slogans of “Pakistan Murdabad” (Death to Pakistan) and “Bharat Mata Ki jay” (Long live Mother India).

Five months after their arrest, the students have several cases pending in different courts.

This includes two pleas in the Allahabad High Court, one relating to their bail plea which has been repeatedly put off citing “procedural delays”, as well as an application for their case to be moved urgently out of Agra.

Dutt says that the content of his clients’ WhatsApp posts is not disputed, rather the way they are being interpreted.

“The charges against them cannot be met,” he says. “If two countries are playing cricket, hailing one country is not promoting enmity. In villages people often refer to their own village as their desh (country). If a woman gets married off to another village, she often refers to her new home as paraya desh (other country). People ask each other ‘which desh are you from?’ implying which village are you from.

“Does that mean they are referring to some other country? Referring to Kashmir as their own country as they have done in the WhatsApp message does not amount to sedition,” he says.

For the families, the students’ education provided hopes for a better life — hopes that are now rapidly fading.

Ahmed says that Yousuf lost his father at a young age and lives with his mother, who works as a labourer to support him and two younger sisters.

“He [Yousuf] was a very good student throughout. I suggested that he study here in NIT Srinagar and stay close to home. But he said that it is only a matter of 3 years and then he will become financially independent and be ready to take care of the family.”

One of Altaf’s relatives, who did not want to be named, says that Altaf’s father is not well educated and works as a carpenter. “He [Altaf] was such a good student. He was our only hope that one day he would finish his education and take care of the family. Now all we want is for him to come home.”

Ganai’s father, Mohammad Shaban Ganai, says that as a “BPL” (Below Poverty Line) family, making ends meet has always been a struggle.

“He [Ganai] has never scored below 75 per cent in any exam. Now look at him, he keeps pleading us on the phone to get him out of jail. For some reason or the other the hearings keep getting delayed. Sometimes the judge doesn’t come or they say it hasn’t been listed today.

“We want justice for our son, and we want the case to be moved out of Agra,” he adds.

According to Indian home ministry data released in July last year, a total of 326 cases were registered under the sedition law between 2014 and 2019.

Of the nearly 11,000 individuals in 816 sedition cases registered since 2010, 65 per cent were implicated after 2014 when Modi took office, reported the Indian news outlet Article 14 in February last year.

Among those charged with sedition are opposition politicians, students, journalists, authors and academics.

While Uttar Pradesh is among the five states with the highest number of sedition cases, the report also revealed that 77 per cent of 115 sedition cases in the state since 2010 were registered since 2017 — when Adityanath first became chief minister. More than half of these were around issues of “nationalism”.

The Independent has reached out to Uttar Pradesh’s additional director general (law and order) Prashant Kumar over phone calls and email regarding the case of the Kashmiri students.

Dutt says the frequent use of the sedition law is an example of the “state misusing its own machinery to crush its own citizens”. “In addition, Kashmiris are often treated differently from other citizens in India,” he says.

Khuehami says that since 2014 incidents of violence have increased against Kashmiri students.

“If Kashmiris make the smallest mistake, they are branded as anti-nationals. What they [the three students] did may be wrong or offensive to some people but it is not illegal.”

The J&K Students Association has written to the chief minister as well as the prime minister, calling on them to pardon the students and pleading that the charges against them are too harsh.

“As a cricket fan I may like [Pakistan’s] Babar Azam more than Virat Kohli. Does that mean I am anti-national?” he asks.