Though he was released on bail immediately after his arrest on August 25the state government invoked the Act against him and he was lodged in the Cherlapally central prison.
After hearing the arguments of advocate-general B S Prasad and counter-arguments of senior counsel L Ravichander, the court ordered Singh’s release. Advocate-on-record K Karuna Sagar, who represented Raja Singh, said the MLA was released “on conditions that he would not take out a victory rally on his release, address the media or post any derogatory or inflammatory speech on social media”.
Ravichander, who represented Sagar, argued that the invocation of the Act against the MLA was politically motivated. The advocate-general argued that it was a fit case for preventive detention as there were a huge number of cases against Singh.
Singh, according to the Hyderabad police, has been involved in 101 criminal cases and 18 of these are related to communal offences. Police had said Singh was “habitually delivering provocative and inflammatory speeches” and “driving a wedge between communities leading to public disorder”.
“The whole argument is about Singh saying something about ‘Aka’. We contend that ‘Aka’ does not mean Prophet. And the government could not have relied upon a fatwa that said ‘Aka’ can mean Prophet. Secondly, every law and order problem cannot be a public order problem. The Supreme Court has said the normal criminal law of land is enough to deal with hate speech and therefore conduct a trial and put him in jail and not under preventive detention,” the senior counsel told indianexpress.com.
Stating that half of the documents shared by police in the case were not legible, the senior counsel said it was a “colourable exercise of power” and that “after the remand was rejected by the magistrate, they wanted to avenge him and therefore he was put in jail”.
Hours after Singh released the video on the night of August 22, thousands hit the streets demanding his immediate arrest. While they argued that the video contained derogatory remarks against Prophet Mohammed, in a video shared on YouTube by Singh, the MLA claimed that he had not named anybody and was only responding to Faruqui’s show. The show was held with police protection after Singh called for disrupting it saying the comic’s earlier remarks had hurt Hindu sentiments.
