The Kerala High Court on Friday granted anticipatory bail to filmmaker Aisha Sultana, in a sedition case which was lodged after her ‘bio-weapon’ remark against Lakshadweep Administrator Praful Khoda Patel and the Central government.
A single-judge Bench of Justice Ashok Menon passed the order, observing that she has no criminal antecedents and is not likely to flee from justice.
The order comes after Aisha was granted interim relief by the same bench on 17 June, on the condition that she cooperates with the police.
An FIR was lodged against her by a BJP leader for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. As per the FIR lodged by the Kavaratti police, a case under sections 124 A (sedition) and 153 B (hate speech) of the Indian Penal code had been registered against Aisha.
Aisha, who hails from Chetlat island in Lakshadweep, works in the Malayalam film industry.
Why was a complaint filed against Aisha Sultana?
Aisha, had claimed during a TV debate on 7 June that the Centre had unleashed biological weapons against the people of Lakshadweep by sending Patel, whose contingent she claimed brought in the first case of coronavirus to the island.
“Lakshadweep had zero cases of Covid-19. Now, it is reporting a daily spike of 100 cases. What the Centre has deployed is a bio-weapon. I can say this clearly that the central government has deployed bio-weapon,” Aysha was quoted as saying by various media reports.
BJP state president Abdul Khader took strong exception to the statement and filed a case against her accusing her of “anti-national” comments “tarnishing the patriotic image of the central government”.
She was even questioned by the Kavaratti police for over 14 hours in total on Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday.
Sultana said the police had asked whether she had any contacts abroad. “They checked my WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook accounts. They were searching whether I have any links with foreign countries,” she said in a video circulated to the media.
In addition to the above controversy, Aisha was accused by the Lakshadweep administration of “breached the interim protection given to her.”
According to a report in The Newsminute, the administration alleged that though Aisha was supposed to be in compulsory home isolation, she interacted with the media and others after appearing before the police. The administration also told the court that Aisha visited patients at a COVID-19 care centre and also a panchayat office, claiming that she was behaving in a manner that could spread the virus on the island.
What Aisha had to say on the matter?
The filmmaker, however, later conceded that it was a mistake.
Explaining her side of the story in an interview with Outlook magazine, Aisha said that the ‘bio-weapon’ comment was a mistake, which she made because she was inexperienced in TV debates. She complained that she was not allowed the space to clarify her statement.
“It was just my fourth ever debate on a television channel. Towards the end of the debate, the person on the panel was uttering a lot of lies about Lakshadweep. I was getting angry… I had no TV screen in front of me and was just using a phone and a headphone for the debate… Half the things they were talking in the debate were not audible to me. I used the bioweapon term to point at the administrator’s policies. I actually meant to use the word biologically. The first person infected with Covid in the island had come along with the administrator. There are media reports about it. I was trying to talk about that. The channel didn’t give me the time to explain it during the debate. The next day I called up the TV channel and told them I needed to explain my version. But they refused,” she said.
She had also vented out on Facebook after the complaint was lodged against him.
“They have filed a sedition case against me but I want to reiterate that truth will win. Case was filed by a BJP worker from Lakshadweep. I will continue my fight for the land where I was born. We don’t fear anyone. My voice is going to be louder now,” she wrote.
The controversy
Aisha’s comments came at a time when Lakshadweep administrator Patel was facing criticism over his policies. Due to the mandatory quarantine and various other COVID protocols, there were no cases of COVID-19 in Lakshadweep for almost a year before Patel took charge as the administrator last year in December. His detractors have claimed that Lakshadweep witnessed an increase in the number of coronavirus cases only after he relaxed the SOPs. Since then, people from the island as well as neighbouring state Kerala are criticising him for his decisions.
Patel has also been facing protests against legislations like Lakshadweep Prevention of Anti-Social Activities Regulation (Goonda Act) and Lakshadweep Panchayat Regulation, 2021 among others.
Aisha’s strong comments against him quickly snowballed into a larger controversy and the subsequent sedition case provided fuel to Patel’s critics, who further accused him of ‘harassing his detractors’.
2/3 I even introduced a Private Member’s Bill in Parliament in 2014-15 to “read down” the Sedition Law as to make the SC interpretation clear. Applying the wrong interpretation to charge Aysha Sultana is little more than harassment.
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) June 11, 2021
3/3 The sedition case will fail in the courts, since it does not meet basic standards, but she will be made to suffer till then. The process is the punishment. It is a total abuse of the process of law & unworthy of our democracy. The case against Aisha Sultana shld be withdrawn.
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) June 11, 2021