Ten days after registering an FIR in association with the farm protest “toolkit” tweeted and consequently removed by Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, Delhi Police’s cyber cell detained 22-year-old climate activist Disha Ravi on Saturday afternoon after a raid on her Bengaluru residence. She has been charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy, among other crimes. Disha, the daughter of an athletics coach has been remanded in police custody for five days.
“Disha Ravi, arrested by CyPAD unit of Delhi Police, is an Editor of the Toolkit Google Doc & key conspirator in document’s formulation & dissemination. She started WhatsApp Group & collaborated to make the Toolkit doc. She worked jointly with them to draft the doc,” Delhi Police said in an announcement tweeted on Sunday.“In this manner, they all cooperated with the pro-Khalistani Poetic Justice Foundation to spread disaffection against the Indian State. She was the one who shared the Toolkit Doc with Greta Thunberg,” it said. Disha, who is a BBA graduate from Mount Carmel College and operates with a start-up preferring plant-based foods. She’s a vegan who broke down on being produced in the Patiala House courts on Sunday and said she had only edited two lines in the toolkit file.
The police declared in their assertion that Disha’s part in drafting the toolkit was “many times more than the 2 lines editing that she claims”. Mentioning technical evidence, the police declared that it was Disha who asked Thunberg to “remove the main doc after its incriminating details accidentally got into the public domain”.The police have caught her electronic gadgets, including her mobile phone and laptops. Besides sedition and plan to provoke rioting, she has been arrested for advancing enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, place of birth, race, and language (153A), and criminal conspiracy (120B).
Sources in Bengaluru Police said there was no previous report about a five-member cyber police team reaching from Delhi to arrest Disha, one of the former members of an environmental campaign called Fridays for Future that is backed by Thunberg. The team, including two women personnel, had reached at the climate activist’s home in north Bengaluru around noon on Saturday. It wasn’t until after the climate activist was accompanied to the airport around 5 pm that Delhi Police notified their Bengaluru counterparts about their first detention in the toolkit case.
“The Delhi Police team arrested Disha and took her there after informing jurisdictional Soladevanahalli police station,” Dharmender Kumar Meena, DCP (North), told TOI. Investigators are searching for two more suspects recognized as Shantanu and Nikita, and raids are being carried in Mumbai and a couple of other places to capture them, officials said. Disha reached on the police’s radar because her IP address was estimated in the list of toolkit editors. The police had investigated technical inputs from Google and some internet service providers to collect the list.
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According to police, the series of incidents in the farmers’ protests, including the violent occurrences at Red Fort on Republic Day, was a “copycat” of the alleged action strategy in the toolkit. On Sunday afternoon, police claimed that Ravi “was the one who shared the toolkit document” with Thunberg. “Later, she claimed Greta to eliminate the main document after its accusatory details unexpectedly got into the public realm. This is many times more than the 2-line editing that she claims,” the police tweeted from its official handle. According to police, Ravi is one of the founders of Fridays For Future India. Fridays for Future is an international movement for climate variation that attained extensive prevalence after Thunberg protested outside the Swedish Parliament in 2018.
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