Indian cartoonist held on sedition charges; custody extended

MUMBAI: A Mumbai court yesterday extended the custody of cartoonist Aseem Trivedi who was arrested on sedition charges over sketches lampooning government corruption, his lawyer said.
The court remanded him in judicial custody until Sept. 24 after he was questioned by police. “As of now we demand sedition charges are dropped against him,” said lawyer Vijay Hiremath. “Today he didn’t want to apply for bail.” The government has recently been criticized for blocking Internet content in an attempt to calm ethnic tensions in Bangalore and other cities.
Some Twitter accounts that ridiculed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were also blocked in the crackdown. A similar row over censorship blew up last year when Communications Minister Kapil Sibal held meetings with Facebook, Google and other IT giants over obscene images that risked offending Muslims or defamed politicians.
Markandey Katju, chairman of the Press Council of India and former Supreme Court judge, defended Trivedi, who was also accused of displaying the contentious cartoons at an anti-corruption rally last year.
Indian riot police fired tear gas to break up thousands of protesters on a beach near the country’s largest nuclear power project, due to fire up within weeks despite months of opposition.
Demonstrators waded into the crashing waves or escaped in fishing boats as hundreds of police advanced, television images showed. Rocks were thrown at police and several injuries were reported on both sides.
Some 4,000 activists, mainly women and children from fishing villages, had camped on the beach about a mile from the Kudankulam power station to complain about the threat of radiation from the plant near the southern tip of India.
First conceived in 1988, the Russian-built plant was supposed to have gone into operation last year, but protesters surrounded the compound after an earthquake and tsunami destroyed Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, spewing radiation and forcing mass evacuations.
They fear a similar accident in a region that was hard hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Last month, the government’s Atomic Energy Regulatory Board gave clearance for fuel to be loaded into one of the plant’s two reactors, one of the last steps before producing power.