Indian minister weighs in on Amnesty free speech row

A senior Indian minister appeared Sunday to support police in a row over free speech that saw Amnesty slapped with sedition charges for an event about the disputed Kashmir region.

Police in the southern city of Bangalore filed the initial charges last week following complaints that slogans on independence for the troubled region had been chanted at the event organized by the rights group.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley compared the freedom slogans to those at another event earlier this year at a prestigious New Delhi university that saw a student leader arrested on sedition charges.
“During an event in Bangalore, there were slogans for freedom (from India)... it was organized by a group that receives a lot of funding from abroad,” Jaitley said at a rally in the Jammu part of the Himalayan state that includes Kashmir, without directly naming Amnesty.
“In Delhi, there were slogans calling for destruction of the country... raising slogans that advocate breaking the nation into pieces cannot be seen as freedom of speech and expression,” he said.
Jaitley was referring to the rally in February at the university in which slogans were chanted that led to the student’s arrest, sparking a major row over freedom of expression in India.
Sedition carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, although convictions are rare.
In the latest case Amnesty denied its staff made any such comments on independence for Kashmir. It said the charges showed a lack of “fundamental rights and freedoms in India.”
Amnesty has said the event was focused on human rights violations in Indian-administered Kashmir, which has been reeling from weeks of deadly violence between protesters and security forces.
Police have said they will investigate who made the comments following complaints from a Hindu nationalist student group.

Rights campaigners have long accused India’s governments of using the British-era sedition law to clamp down on dissent.
Sedition charges have been used in the past against supporters of independence for Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan but claimed in full by both.

Three militants killed near Kashmir border

Meanwhile, Indian soldiers killed three suspected rebels in a gun battle Sunday in Indian-administered Kashmir, the army said, as the region reels from weeks of deadly violence between protesters and security forces.
The rebels were killed in Tangdhar north of the main city of Srinagar after crossing over from the Pakistani side of the heavily militarised border that divides the area between the two countries, it said.
“Three terrorists were killed in the fight. Three assault rifles were also recovered from the site of the gun battle,” army spokesman Col. N.N. Joshi said.
The army was trying to determine if the rebels were part of the same group that attacked an Indian ammunition depot in the area on Friday, injuring at least three border guards.
Indian Kashmir has been under curfew since protests erupted over the death last month of a popular young rebel leader, Burhan Wani, in a gunfight with security forces.
More than 65 civilians have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces, and thousands more injured in the worst violence to hit the Himalayan region since 2010.
Wani’s Hizbul Mujahideen and several other rebel groups have fought for decades an estimated 500,000 Indian soldiers deployed in the territory, demanding independence for the region or its merger with Pakistan.
Tens of thousands, mostly civilians, have died in the fighting since 1989 when the armed rebellion began.

Source: Arab News