By Anuja Jaiswal
The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed an appeal by the Uttar Pradesh government against the Allahabad high court order that had quashed Dr Kafeel Khan’s detention under the National Security Act (NSA) in September.
“We see no reason to interfere,” a three-judge bench of Chief Justice of India S A Bobde and Justices A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian said. Criminal cases against Khan will be decided “on their own merits”, the bench added.
Khan had been held at Mathura jail for seven months after he delivered a speech during the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act at Aligarh Muslim University which the government deemed “provocative”. The high court had, while allowing his release, observed that his speech does not “disclose any effort to promote hatred or violence”. It, instead, “gives a call for national integrity and unity… (and) deprecates any kind of violence”.
For Khan, the Supreme Court’s decision came as a reprieve in what has been three years of intermittent legal battles. “My youngest brother is getting married today (Thursday). All I wanted was to be there for him, even if the verdict didn’t go my way. The past few days, we have been under extreme stress,” he told TOI from Delhi.
The pre-wedding ceremony on Wednesday had been an uneasy event. Khan said he couldn’t sleep at night. “In the morning, I wore a sherwani and entered my lawyer’s office wondering if I would get a chance to see my family before I was carted off… I hugged my children goodbye before leaving for court and held on to Ammi jaan.”
His wife, Dr Shabista Khan, and mother, Nuzhat Parveen, had been impatiently waiting at the wedding venue. “The rituals were on. But we were all waiting. We didn’t know if he’d get here or be arrested from there,” Shabista said.
After the Supreme Court decision, he called his mother. “Other family members joined in the video call. We broke into tears.”
Khan has been locked in a battle with the state government since 2017, when over 70 children died at the Baba Raghav Das Medical College in Gorakhpur in just a month because there weren’t enough oxygen cylinders. Khan was suspended from his position as the nodal officer for the paediatric department at the hospital. “My family and I have been suffering for more than three years. I never did anything wrong,” he said. He has not been reinstated yet.
“I will continue practising as a doctor and helping those who need me,” he said. “I have organised 100-odd medical camps so far. With help from health activists across the nation, I will do more. No one should be cut off from healthcare because of money, age, caste, religion or gender.” ( TOI )
