Another oft-repeated name in the JNU sedition row apart from student union president Kanhaiya Kumar is Umar Khaled. We know he has been charged with sedition and he went missing for three weeks after the 9 February protest. But what else do we know?
Swara Bhaskar, writing for The Quint, says he is ‘not a terrorist, but a radical and an idiot with poor judgement on what to say where.’
PhD Student
Umar Khaled is a 28-year-old student pursuing a PhD in history from the school of social sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
He turned down a scholarship at Yale University in the US to continue to live and study in India and work for the benefits of dalits and adivasis.
Alleged Mastermind
It’s been alleged that the member of Democratic Students Union (DSU), an extreme leftist and an atheist, was the mastermind of the ‘anti-national’ protests.
According to Delhi Police, his call records showed more than 800 calls made during his disappearance. Out of these, 38 calls were made to Kashmir and a lot of them to Bangladesh and the Gulf.
Umar doesn’t have a passport and is not planning to flee the country, his father said.
These phone calls were being considered as incriminating evidence to his so-called terror links. However, the intelligence Bureau of India later clarified that Umar has no links to any terror group.
We do not have any such evidence. All we can say is he is a part of Democratic Students Union, which as per our evidence is a front for Maoists.Senior Official, Intelligence Burea of India
‘I am Not a Terrorist’
Umar Khaled, one of the six students accused of raising anti-national slogans at the JNU on February 9, late on Sunday said he was “not a terrorist”, adding the BJP government “needed an excuse to target the campus”.
My name is Umar Khaled and I’m not a terrorist. The attack (on the university) is not because of the program which was organised on Feburary 9, but because the government needs an excuse to attack us.
Khaled, along with four other accused, Anant Prakash Narayan, Ashutosh Kumar, Rama Naga, Anirban Bhattacharya, returned back to the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus late on Sunday.
Family
Umar Khaled’s father, Syed Qasim Rasool Ilyas is the president of the Welfare Party of India, which operates out of Abul Fazl Enclave in southeast Delhi. His sisters and mother have been getting violent threats via social media, in the period that he went missing.
Ilyas was a member of SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India) in 1985. Back then, he said there was no case against the organisation or any individual part of it. He voluntarily left the organisation before Umar was born.
SIMI was banned in 2001.
He said his son was fighting for the cause of the tribals and poor farmers and that he always stood with them.
Ilyas criticised the arrest of JNU students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of sedition as well as the “atmosphere that is being created against Khaled and his friends”.
Self-Professed Atheist and Communist
Ilyas said he had frequent arguments with his son over his “abject denouncement of the family’s religious beliefs”. Umar is a self-proclaimed atheist and communist. On Umar’s ‘Afzal Guru death anniversary program’, his father said,
I don’t subscribe to some of the slogans Umar raised..but can praise for Afzal Guru be considered sedition?
“It has been hard, worrying about Umar and going through this. We are educated people who have engaged in social work through our lives as much as we could. We never went after corporate jobs. My ideologies may be different from my son’s but I never did that and neither did he. And look where we are now, what is being said of us,” Ilyas said.
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