Shaheen School Sedition Case: Police Questioning Children Violated Their Rights, Says Karnataka HC

The interrogation of children by weapon-carrying and uniformed policemen at Karnataka’s Shaheen School last January in a sedition case amounted to a violation of the Juvenile Justice Act and was prima facie a “serious case of violation of the rights of children”, Karnataka High Court observed on Monday.

The case against the school management was filed over a play opposing the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

“Prima facie this is a serious case of violation of the rights of children and provision 86 (5) of JJ Act 2015,” a division bench of the High Court observed in the course of hearing a petition against the questioning of children over the play against CAA, staged in January 2020 at a primary school run by Shaheen Education Society in Bidar.

A division bench of Chief Justice Abhay Oka and Justice NS Sanjay Gowda on Monday asked concerned higher officials to submit an affidavit on what action they will take against the police officials who interrogated these children.

The Court also directed the state government to come up with guidelines so that those guidelines in the future will be a law for the police, whenever they are interrogating children.

Nazbunnisa, the mother of Ayesha, a 9-year-old female student, and Fareeda Begum, the head-teacher of Shaheen School in Bidar, was arrested on January 30 on charges of sedition for staging an anti-CAA play in the school. The Police had filed an FIR against them after Neelesh Rakshyal, member of the far-right Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), had filed a complaint on January 26.

The Karnataka Police has come under heavy criticism for their aggressive action of arresting a widowed mother and the teacher for staging a play and the way, it conducted itself by interrogating little children.

Students as young as nine years old were repeatedly interrogated by the police for participating in the play. The interrogation of minor children only stopped after the Karnataka State Commission for Protection of Child Rights slammed the Bidar district police for violating rules and for creating “atmosphere of fear” at the school.