Just what are the charges against the twenty-seven students and teachers from Hyderabad Central University who were arrested on Tuesday? Since the judge hearing their bail petition has kept the "judgement in abeyance", they will all remain in jail till at least till Monday.
In the video above, lawyer Gunratan, a member of the legal team fighting for the students, details the case against those arrested from the campus. There are three first information reports in all, and several charges, two of which are non-bailable.
"One is section 147, which is injuring or attacking someone with weapons", and the second one is under Section 353 "which is stopping a public servant from doing his or her duty", he says.
"So basically the legal situation is that there are three FIRs... One is by the police, the other is by the registrar of the university... and the police have also revived another FIR which is case No. 22 which was filed on the night of the death of Rohith Vemula..."
"Under the first FIR there are 30 students and two faculty members who are accused. In the second one there are 45 accused; in total there are 27 people who were detained... The rule is that if you are detained by the police, then within 24 hours of the detention the police has to produce you in front of a magistrate, and then the magistrate has to take a decision about your arrest..."
"The police did not produce them in court throughout the day, yesterday (Wednesday)... At 11.40 PM, that is, late at night, they produced 27 people in front of a magistrate, and the magistrate sent them for jail custody for 14 days... So today morning there was a group of lawyers who were trying to file a writ of Habeas Corpus, which you normally file if a person has not been produced in the high court, but when we found that these people had already been remanded to police custody, the focus shifted to filing a bail petition. So a bail petition was filed for these 27 students..."
After it was argued, he says, "The judge said she'll give her decision after half an hour, but after half an hour what she did was that she didn't give either a yes or no decision but kept the judgement in abeyance till Monday... because it has been kept in abeyance, no further legal move can be done, so now we are basically stuck till Monday and these 27 people will have to remain in jail at least till Monday when this decision will be given."
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