On Friday, comic Munawar Faruqui received interim bail from the Supreme Court, after spending more than a month in jail for allegedly insulting Hindu deities. His earlier requests for bail had been rejected by both the sessions court and the Madhya Pradesh High Court. The case attracted controversy because of the arbitrary nature of the charges: the police itself admitted that it had no evidence to show that the comedian had actually hurt religious sentiments.
People present at the club say that the police detained him before he had actually started performing.
However, even though Faruqui has got bail, four of the five other people who were arrested along with him in Madhya Pradesh on January 1 are still in jail. If Faruqui’s arrest was seen as arbitrary, theirs is even more so. The police seemined to pick up people at random in the club in Indore in which the comic was due to perform.