Delhi LG grants sanction to prosecute Shehla Rashid for tweets against Indian Army

New Delhi, Jan 10: Delhi Lieutenant Governor V K Saxena has granted sanction to prosecute former JNUSU vice president Shehla Rashid Shora for her tweets on the Indian Army.

 

The sanction is in connection with a 2019 FIR registered against her under IPC section 153A at Special Cell police station here on the basis of a complaint by an advocate Alakh Alok Srivastava.

 

The sanction has been granted under section 196 of CrPC, 1973 which relates to prosecution for offences against the State and for criminal conspiracy to commit such offence.

 

 

In 2019, she had tweeted in her tweets that the Indian Armed Forces were "entering houses" and "picking up boys" in Jammu and Kashmir. The first tweet read, "Armed Forces are entering houses at night, picking up boys, ransacking houses, deliberately spilling rations on the floor, mixing oil with rice, etc." The tweets came after the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019.

 

 

In another tweet, she had said, "In Shopian, 04 men were called into the Army Camp and 'interrogated' (tortured). A mic was kept close to them so that the entire area could hear them scream and be terrorized. This created an environment of fear in the entire area."

 

The Home Department had observed that the "nature of case, location to which the tweets refer and making false allegations against the Army make it a serious issue". "The tweets by her needed to be proceeded against for creating religious fault-lines in J&K and a case was made for prosecution under Section 153A IPC," it said.

 

The allegations were rejected by the Army as baseless.

 

She has been promoting enmity between different groups and indulging in acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony through her tweets.