NEW DELHI: India’s newly elected lawmakers took the oath of office Tuesday, but without two vocal government critics unable to take their seats because they are jailed on national security charges.
One is the Sikh separatist Amritpal Singh, a firebrand preacher arrested last year after a month-long police manhunt in Punjab state.
The other is Sheikh Abdul Rashid, a former state legislator in Indian-administered Kashmir, known popularly as Engineer Rashid.
Rashid, arrested on charges of “terror funding” and money laundering in 2019, is awaiting his latest bail hearing on July 1, his lawyer Ubaid Shams told AFP.
The family of Singh, an advocate of the banned Khalistan movement for an independent Sikh homeland — the struggle for which sparked deadly violence in the 1980s and 1990s — said they had no news on whether he could take the oath.
“We don’t know whether he will come out of jail or not”, his father Tarsem Singh told AFP.
“We are at our village, and haven’t heard anything from the government,” he said from his home in rural Punjab.
“We don’t know what the authorities are thinking about his release.”
Rashid’s name was called out in parliament on Monday when lawmakers began taking their oaths, with Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi the first to take the stand.
Modi, 73, on Monday appealed to an emboldened opposition for “consensus” following an election setback that forced him into a coalition government for the first time in a decade.
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