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Mangaluru: Over ten months after the Mumbai police booked nine students from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) for arranging a memorial event for Delhi University professor G.N. Saibaba, a Mumbai sessions court on Friday (August 7) denied pre-arrest bail to two of the nine students. Within hours, the police arrested one of them, in a case that the court, by its own admission, had observed hardly amounts to a “crime”, and yet denied two of them pre-arrest bail.

Kamakhya Prasad Das (23) from Assam and Abhirup Paul (32) from West Bengal had attended a memorial meetup for Saibaba at TISS’s Mumbai campus, along with seven other students, in October last year. Paul, who works in Mumbai after having obtained his Master’s degree from TISS, was arrested on the night of August 7 and produced before a magistrate’s court in Mumbai on August 8. Despite the police seeking his custody for ten days, the court granted only a day’s custody.

In a rather strange order, Sessions Judge V.B. Bohra granted bail to seven others named as accused in the case, but refused it to Das and Paul on the grounds that they had not shown “respect” for the law – an act that in itself is not a recognised offence under Indian law.

The memorial meetup was a peaceful get-together where only nine students gathered, lit candles and recited Saibaba’s poems. At the meetup, a few students also held placards with the message “Rest in Power (since 1967-forever),” in Saibaba’s memory.

The court, while denying pre-arrest bail to the duo, observed that while offering homage to Saibaba in itself can’t be held as illegal, the two former TISS students had also raised slogans seeking the release of student activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, who are........

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