Protests spread but India’s top court refuses to intervene in student leader’s arrest

India’s Supreme Court on Friday refused to consider a bail plea from a left-wing student leader whose arrest for sedition triggered demonstrations in universities across the country against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling nationalist group. Rivals said the government was trying to crush dissent after it ordered police to detain Kanhaiya Kumar, the head of the Jawaharlal Nehru University students union, for commemorating the anniversary of the execution of a Kashmiri separatist. India’s top court suggested Kumar, 28, approach the lower Delhi high court for bail, saying it didn’t have to intervene in the case and that lower courts were qualified to handle a bail application.

It was a life-threatening situation.

Kumar’s lawyer Vrinda Grover

Kumar had sought the Supreme Court’s intervention after a previous hearing in a lower court descended into chaos as lawyers chanting nationalist slogans barged into the compound and threw stones at reporters in a case that has become politically charged. The case against Kumar is under the colonial-era sedition law and has fuelled fears that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party is creating a climate of fear in the country and is promoting a fiercely nationalist agenda aimed at the minority groups. But the government said the right to speech wasn’t unfettered and Home Minister Rajnath Singh put out a Twitter post that those who shouted “anti-India” slogans and challenge the integrity of the country will not be spared.

India student