Kannada actor Chetan Kumar says his recent arrest over a tweet on the judge hearing the ongoing Hijab case was a State-sponsored conspiracy to harass and intimidate him into keeping quiet.
In conversation with Silverscreen India, Chetan, who is currently out on bail, says, “I don’t know who they are, but there are immensely powerful forces behind this.”
Recollecting the day of his arrest, the actor says three police officials came to his house, including an inspector named Ravi. He was taken into custody around 3.30 pm in the afternoon of February 22 without any notice or arrest warrant. “I was essentially just taken in a car surrounded by police officers and stripped off my phone and held at Sheshadripuram police station.” No one was informed about his arrest either.
After he was taken into custody, there was no sign-up or any declaration of the arrest, he adds. “I did not know why I was there and I was asking who the complainant was. But there was no complainant. They showed me no chargesheet or FIR.”
It was only around 10.30 or 11 pm that Inspector Ravi from Sheshadripuram police station informed Chetan that the police had taken suo moto cognisance of his tweet and arrested him.
The actor believes exceptionally powerful people – be they part of the police, in the government or the judiciary – are behind the incident. He adds that Inspector Ravi was likely a scapegoat. “He seemed like a pawn in this whole charade,” he says, adding that it is unlikely for an officer like him to “have the kind of conviction or police power to unilaterally take such kind of action, especially when it’s unjustified.”
Chetan says the situation seemed more like someone had said, “Let’s throw him in jail and then figure out how we’re going to do that.”
“As they put me in the police station, they realised that a lot of people would come. So, they secretly transported me to another police station and kept me there for eight to nine hours until 12 o’clock, and then took me to the magistrate and then to jail.”
Chetan’s wife Megha showed up at the police station, along with several activists from across the state. She went live on Facebook and narrated what had happened.
Regarding the tweet in question, Chetan says it was an innocuous, harmless tweet, and not one that “promotes enmity between communities or incites communal conflicts” as the police claim, which would be a non-bailable offence.
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On February 16, the actor had tweeted questioning whether Justice Krishna Dixit of the Karnataka High Court was the right person to be hearing the Hijab case. Sharing one of his own tweets from two years ago, about the same judge granting bail to a rape accused on the grounds that the victim had not behaved as an “Indian woman” who was “ravished” would, Chetan wrote, “This is a tweet I wrote nearly two years ago regarding a Karnataka High Court decision. Justice Krishna Dixit made such disturbing comments in a rape case. Now this same judge is determining whether hijabs are acceptable or not in government schools. Does he have the clarity required?”
“It’s just a question,” Chetan tells Silverscreen India. “I pointed out the misogynistic judgment of 2020 because the current Hijab issue is not just a cultural, religious, or education issue. It’s also a gender issue. So the tweet was providing relevant background knowledge on the judge.”
“Nobody is beyond questioning, beyond the purview of the democracy or the law, but they act like they are,” he adds.
The actor states that what happened to him was “essentially kidnapping” and creating “fabricated spurious charges” to crush him for speaking out about equality and social justice. He says that the State and the police think he is a “threat to their corrupt, unjust system.”
On February 25, Chetan was granted bail. However, the jail authorities stalled his paperwork, the actor claims, and because it was a Friday, he was held in custody over the weekend. He was finally released around 9 pm on Monday.
There have been media reports that Chetan, who is a US citizen, might be deported to the USA. Asked about this, the actor tells us, “It’s seems to be a kind of sensationalised media swoop in order to create some sort of fear in our movement rather than anything actually credibly happening.”
Chetan has to appear in court on Sunday and a few more times in the next 20 days as part of his bail condition. He has still not got his phone back from the police. However, the actor states that this incident will not deter him from continuing to speak out.