Delhi violence and UAPA accused Natasha Narwal’s bail plea to attend the last rites and cremation of her father Mahavir Narwal was granted by the Delhi High Court on 10 May. The plea had been filed initially to meet her ailing father, battling COVID, in a hospital in Haryana’s Rohtak district. By the time the case was heard on 10 May, he had died. He breathed his last at 6 pm on 9 May.
She has been granted bail on conditions that include a personal bond of Rs 50,000, to provide her number to the concerned police stations in Delhi and Haryana etc. The Special Public Prosecutors Amit Mahajan and Amit Prasad however made a request towards the end of the hearing that Narwal does not use social media to comment on the case in the interim, the court noted the request and made an oral remark to her lawyer, Adit Pujari, that she must maintain ‘radio silence.’
Her father, Mahavir Narwal, was a senior member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and a retired senior scientist from CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar. He had been hospitalised on 3 May and was a diabetes patient which caused additional complications in his treatment of COVID. He was put on a ventilator on 9 May and died a few hours later.
Natasha was arrested over a year ago on 23 February last year, on charges of instigating the northeast Delhi riots which claimed the lives of 53 people. She is a member of Pinjra Tod and a student of the Jawaharlal Nehru University