Invoking criminal charges against Ashoka University Associate Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad was “outrageous and absurd”, a group of retired bureaucrats and diplomats said on Wednesday.

The former civil servants, who are part of the Constitutional Conduct Group, said that the social media posts for which two cases were filed against Mahmudabad were thoughtful and measured. The key point of the posts was “to make eloquent and heartfelt calls for peace”, they noted.

The cases against Mahmudabad, who heads the political science department at Ashoka University, were filed for his comments about the media briefings on the Indian military operation against terrorist camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir initiated in the response to the April 22 Pahalgam attack.

On May 8, in a social media post, Mahmudabad had highlighted the apparent irony of Hindutva commentators praising Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, who had represented the Army during the media briefings about the Indian military operation.

“Perhaps they could also equally loudly demand that the victims of mob lynchings, arbitrary bulldozing and others who are victims of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s hate mongering be protected as Indian citizens,” he had said.

One of the complainants against the post was an office-bearer of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s youth wing, while the other was the head of the Haryana State Women’s Commission.

Mahmudabad faces charges under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to acts prejudicial to maintaining communal harmony, making assertions likely to cause disharmony, acts endangering national sovereignty and words or gestures intended to insult a woman’s modesty, among others.

He was arrested on May 18, but got interim bail from the Supreme Court three days later.

The former civil servants said on Wednesday that they were “greatly distressed” by the charges against Mahmudabad and his subsequent arrest. “It cannot be a crime to seek justice for victims of lynching and bulldozer demolitions, or to call for peace and restraint,” they remarked.

Also read: Why Ashoka University professor’s arrest has no legal basis

The ex-bureaucrats noted that despite Supreme Court orders directing authorities to act against hate speech on their own, even utterances that “openly call for violence and ethnic cleansing of Indian Muslims” have rarely led to charges of disloyalty to the nation or promoting religious hatred.

“In the most recent case, after a minister from Madhya Pradesh, Kunwar Vijay Shah, described Colonel Sofiya Qureshi as the sister of terrorists, it required the MP High Court to direct the police to register an FIR against the minister,” they noted.

The signatories to the statement said that while they were relieved that the Supreme Court granted Mahmudabad interim bail, they were “dismayed” by some comments made by the bench, and by the bail conditions.

“The bench made mystifying allusions to ‘dog-whistling’ in the professor’s social media tweets, criticising his ‘choice of words’ and charging him with seeking ‘cheap publicity’.” the former civil servants said.

They also questioned the order to appoint a Special Investigation Team to “holistically understand the complexity of the phraseology employed” by the Ashoka University professor. “It is beyond our comprehension how three police officers could be equipped to extract hidden meanings from a post written in elegant and straightforward English,” they said.

The signatories referred to a Supreme Court judgement from March, which said that in a democracy, even views that are opposed by many people must be “respected and protected”. Calling on the court to uphold these principles, the former bureaucrats said: “The perils and consequences of suppressing free speech by unjust application of criminal law can be profoundly corrosive for a society.”

The signatories to the statement include Punjab’s former director general of police Julio Ribeiro, Delhi’s former Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung, former Foreign Secretary and National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and former Indian Administrative Service officer Harsh Mander.

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