COVID-19: Police, govt officials visit Shaheen Bagh, urge protestors to vacate; no breakthrough

Officials from police and Southeast district administration visited Shaheen Bagh on Tuesday and urged the anti-CAA protestors to vacate the area in the wake of coronavirus outbreak.

The move comes a day after the Delhi government announced that any gathering - religious, family, social, political or cultural - of more than 50 people will not be allowed in the national capital till March 31 amid coronavirus scare.

Police said that they held a meeting on Monday also regarding the same issue but nothing came out of it.

"We have conducted a meeting on Tuesday to the protesters. We urged them to end their protest after the outbreak of coronavirus. We held a meeting on Monday also but nothing positive has come out of the meetings," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southeast) (DCP) R P Meena said.

 

However, protesters claimed that police only spoke to some 10 to 15 people and did not come to the place where they were sitting.

"Today, senior police officers came here and talked to some 10 to 15 people near the barricading. We asked them to come to the pandal and announce their appeal to the protesters through the stage, but they did not come," one of the protesters claimed.

According to the protestors, the police and administration officials wanted to talk to the demonstrators over vacating one of the carriageways on the road.

"However, there could be no talks as the government officials wanted protestors to come to the barricading - some 50 metres from the protest site, while the protestors insisted they came to the stage to speak with them," Syed Taseer Ahmed, one of the regulars at the protest since the beginning, told PTI.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people, including women and children, stayed put on the road as their protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) completed 94th day.

Protests against the CAA had started on December 15 at Shaheen Bagh and eventually at other places in the national capital and elsewhere in the country.

Delhi has so far reported eight positive cases, including one death due to coronavirus, even as the number of positive cases rose to 137 across the country by Tuesday evening, according to the Union Home Ministry.