Kanhaiya roughed up by lawyers in Patiala House Court

Delhi police carried out fresh raids in several Indian cities on Wednesday as they stepped up a search for students in a controversial sedition case after the arrest of a student leader that has sparked mass protests.

“If Shatrughan Sinha thinks Kanhaiya Kumar is innocent and his stand is right, he should resign from the primary membership of the BJP and also resign as MP”, Pandey told the media here.

He said he will forward a report on the entire matter to the home ministry.

Mr Kumar said a high-level JNU committee is investigating the February 9 incident in which anti-national slogans were raised and the eight students who were found to be involved in it have been debarred from the university after a preliminary inquiry.

They managed to enter the court complex despite heavy police presence and roughed up a few journalists, snatched their mobiles and deleted video footage.

“We never called the police, we just cooperated with them”.

The attacks and Kumar’s arrest highlighted allegations of increasing of intolerance in India since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014.

The Supreme Court had, earlier in the day, restricted the number of people inside the courtroom, allowing only five reporters and two supporters of the arrested students to attend the hearing.

Protests against Guru’s execution have regularly been held in Kashmir, where many believe he was not given a fair trial.

They said they too bore the brunt of the people in lawyers’ robes who gave them “the choicest of the abuses and tried to hurt them by throwing sharp-edged flower pots and water bottles”.

Late on Tuesday, students at Jadavpur University in eastern Kolkata carried out a protest march on the streets, raising anti-India slogans.