(TibetanReview.net, Sep30’22) – The Madras High Court in the south Indian state Tamil Nadu has quashed a case registered against 9 students from Tibet who were alleged to have protested against Chinese President Xi Jinping during the latter’s visit to the city of Chennai in 2019, reported newswaali.com Sep 29.
The court accepted the students’ argument that they were innocent and picked up at random by police and in any case the law under which they were arrested had expired.
The Oct 2019 visit saw Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meeting with Xi in the coastal town of Mamallapuram. During that second India-China informal summit (the first having taken place in Wuhan the year before), the two sides looked to chart a new course for bilateral ties over the next few decades despite a series of irritants that had cropped up between the two nations, noted the livemint.com Oct 11, 2019.
Tibetan college students studying in Chennai protested against the visit, leading to the eventual arrest of nine of them on allegations of unlawful assembly and protest, said the newswaali.com report.
A case was registered against them at Neelangarai and Selaiyur police stations under sections that included stopping buses plying on the road and damaging them and preventing constables on duty.
The students have maintained that they had committed no wrongdoing; that their college and hostel were closed at that time, and the state police forcibly arrested them from their homes and threw them in jail.
Following it, the nine Tibetan youths, including one named Tenzing Lupchung, approached the Madras High Court, seeking to quash the case. Trial judge Justice RN Manjula has dismissed the case against the nine Tibetan students following the high court ruling.