Shirtless protest: Delhi court sends 3 IYC workers arrested from Shimla to 3-day police custody

New Delhi: A Delhi court on Thursday sent three accused brought to the capital after a dramatic 24-hour standoff with the Shimla police following their arrest in the hill state over the shirtless protest at the AI Impact Summit here last week to three-day police custody.

Chief Judicial Magistrate Mridul Gupta passed the order on Delhi Police’s plea seeking five-day custodial interrogation of the three accused Youth Congress activists. The magistrate said the accused trio needs to be produced in court on completion of their police remand on March 1. The accused were produced in the court amid heavy security arrangements.

During the proceedings, the public prosecutor said that Saurabh and Arbaz Khan from Uttar Pradesh, and Sidharth Avdhut of Madhya Pradesh were “hiding in Himachal Pradesh”, and that they were arrested from a resort around 6:40 am on Wednesday.

The prosecutor said the trio was produced before a magistrate in Shimla around 1:40 pm the same day, who allowed Delhi Police’s plea seeking transit remand, and directed their production in the Delhi court concerned within 18 hours.

He said that while Sidharth designed the T-shirt displayed by the Youth Congress workers at the Summit venue on February 20, Saurabh created a WhatsApp group. Saurabh and Arbaz were present during the protest, he said.

“More than one lakh T-shirts were printed… We need to find the printing source, ascertain the origin and mechanism of the conspiracy, confront them with the co-accused, effect recovery, find the names of others involved…,” the prosecutor said.

The counsel for the accused claimed Delhi Police had engaged in “witch-hunting” by arresting those carrying out a peaceful protest.

“No recovery has been effected, there is non-compliance with rules. If you see the FIR, it mentions the same sentence as in the JNU case: ‘Tukde-Tukde’. What kind of precedent are we setting?” the advocate asked.

He also claimed that “political targeting of certain people belonging to the main opposition party. “They are trying to set an example for political parties,” the counsel said.

The court also extended the police remand by three days of two other accused, Ajay Kumar and Raja Gujar, arrested earlier and produced in court on Thursday on completion of their three-day police custody.

The arrests sparked a high-voltage standoff between police teams of Delhi and Shimla, which ended after a dramatic 24 hours on Thursday morning, when the Delhi Police team was finally cleared to head back to the capital along with the three accused.

In the stalemate, the Delhi Police team was "detained" for about five hours even after procuring transit remand from the ACJM.