The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a plea asking for contempt charges to be levelled against Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar. The plea also names absconding student activist Umar Khalid, former Delhi University professor SAR Geelani and four others. The fresh charges come at a time when Kumar has already been arrested and kept in custody for sedition, and JNU is at the centre of a furore set off by a protest against the hanging of Parliament attacks convict Afzal Guru.

According to the plea, Kumar and the others distributed pamphlets that claimed Guru’s death was a judicial killing. However, both the High Court and the Supreme Court had confirmed the death sentence. This, the plea argues, amounts to contempt of court. “ …judges of the apex court have been projected as killers despite the free and fair trial of the convict and it clearly tantamount to criminal contempt,” said the petitioner Vineet Dhanda, a Supreme Court lawyer.

A bench headed by Chief Justice of India TS Thakur listed the plea for hearing next week. According to India Today, the other four people named in the petition are Lenin Kumar, member of the Democratic Student Federation, research scholar Anirban Bhattacharya, JNUSU vice-president Shehla Rashid Shora, and Ali Javed, a member of the Press Club of India.