Actor Chetan Kumar has been arrested by the Bengaluru Police, his wife Megha alleged in a Facebook video on Tuesday, 22 February.
Bengaluru Police Commissioner Kamal Pant told TNM that Chetan has been taken into custody and is being questioned over a tweet about one of the sitting Karnataka High Court judges, who is part of the three-judge bench hearing the batch of pleas against the hijab ban in campuses.
A decision on arresting Chetan will be taken after the questioning, Pant said. In a statement, Pant said that Chetan has been booked under Section 505 (2) (intent to incite a class or community to commit offence against another class or community) and Section 504 (intentionally insulting, thereby giving provocation to any person to break public peace) of the Indian Penal Code. The statement also says that Chetan will be produced before the jurisdictional magistrate soon.
According to other sources, the police had advised the public not to make provocative statements about the hijab hearing. The police have taken suo motu cognisance of Chetan’s tweet dated 16 February where he questioned Justice Krishna Dixit of the high court.
Chetan mentioned another case where the judge had given bail to a rape accused noting that the complainant’s explanation that she was tired and had fallen asleep after the sexual assault is “unbecoming of an Indian woman; that is not the way our women react when they are ravished.”
In a live chat from Chetan’s Facebook page on 22 February evening, Chetan's wife Megha said that he had gone missing from the house. “No one informed us, his phone is switched off, so is our gunman’s.”
Megha told TNM that it is not yet known where Chetan has been detained. She has filed a complaint with the Bengaluru Police Commissioner’s office, seeking information on his whereabouts.
(Published in special arrangement with The News Minute.)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)