A court in Delhi on Tuesday granted the police time till September 18 to procure sanctions in the Jawaharlal Nehru University sedition case against former students’ union leader Kanhaiya Kumar, and others. The order was passed after the Delhi Police told the court that it had not received sanctions from authorities to prosecute those named in the chargesheet, PTI reported.

The court of Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Manish Khurana directed the deputy commissioner of police to clarify the status of the sanctions, according to Bar and Bench.

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The case is related to accusations against Kanhaiya Kumar and others in connection with anti-national slogans allegedly chanted at the campus in February 2016. The Delhi Police had filed a chargesheet in a local court but failed to procure sanctions from the state government to prosecute the accused.

Meanwhile, the government’s standing counsel has told the government to turn down the police’s request for sanctions. Law officer Rahul Mehra concluded, after looking at the original complaint and the transcript of the whole episode, that there was a material error in the filing of the chargesheet, The Indian Express reported, quoting unidentified officials in Delhi government’s Home Department. Mehra reportedly pointed out that the police might have tried to take advantage of the publicity around the case. He said criticising the government or its policies did not amount to sedition.

The police had purportedly filed the chargesheet two hours after the investigating officer filed an application for prosecution with the Home department. The counsel had reportedly said that in case the sanction was wrongly accorded it would have serious consequences for the accused, who were all students, the newspaper reported. In January, the Delhi court had criticised the police for filing the chargesheet without the state government’s approval.