"Not Writing Family Man Script": Umar Khalid Slams Delhi Riots Chargesheet

Former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student leader Umar Khalid, arrested under the stringent anti-terror law UAPA in the north-east Delhi riots conspiracy case, told a court on Friday that the chargesheet against him reads like a "web series or TV news script" and referred to Harry Potter villain Voldemort while criticising the police.

Mr Khalid and several others are accused of being the "masterminds" of the February 2020 riots, which left 53 people dead and over 700 injured. He has sought bail in the case.

Senior Advocate Trideep Pais, representing Mr Khalid, told Additional Sessions Judge Amitabh Rawat that the chargesheet makes hyperbolic allegations against his client without any factual basis and is the result of a "fertile imagination of the police officer who drafted it".

The lawyer also gave a reference of Voldemort, a villain in the Harry Potter series, to draw parallels between the statements in the chargesheet, among other examples, to show that the final report filed by the police was "rubbish".

"The chargesheet is a result of the fertile imagination of the police officer who drafted it and the witnesses are procured... He is not writing the script of Family Man (a web series). This is a chargesheet," Mr Pais said.

Referring to a line in the chargesheet that said Mr Khalid did not stay in Delhi as he knew he would be thrown into fire, the lawyer said the only way the police officer could have known this was if "he was inside Khalid's mind".

"The last person who travelled with someone and got into this officer's head was Voldemort from Harry Potter," the lawyer said.

Mr Khalid's lawyer said the allegation that Mr Khalid was maintaining a "facade of secular politics" was a figment of the police's imagination, and that it "reads like a 9 pm TV news channel script."

Mr Pais said several statements carried in the chargesheet cannot be relied upon while considering Mr Khalid's bail. "There is no way these statements are consistent with each other and meet the test under UAPA," he added.

In the last hearing, Mr Pais had argued that the police's case was based on truncated clips of Mr Khalid's speech given at Amaravati and telecast by two TV channels, which were in turn based on an edited video tweeted by BJP leader Amit Malviya.