Delhi cops pick up 22-year-old Disha Ravi from Bengaluru for sedition in Greta toolkit case

NEW DELHI/BENGALURU: Ten days after filing an FIR in connection with the farm protest “toolkit” tweeted and subsequently deleted by Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, Delhi Police’s cyber cell arrested 22-year-old climate activist Disha Ravi in a hush-hush Saturday afternoon raid on her Bengaluru home.

She has been charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy, among other offences. The daughter of an athletics coach, she 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 closely with them to draft the doc,” Delhi Police said in a statement tweeted on Sunday.


“In this process, they all collaborated with 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 from Mount Carmel College and works with a start-up promoting plant-based foods — she’s a vegan — broke down on being produced in the Patiala House courts on Sunday and said she had only edited two lines in the toolkit file.

‘Cops looking for 2 more suspects, raids going on’
The police, however, alleged in their statement that Disha’s role in framing the toolkit was “many times more than the 2 lines editing that she claims”. Citing technical evidence, the police claimed that it was Disha who asked Thunberg to “remove the main doc after its incriminating details accidentally got into public domain”.

The police have seized her electronic gadgets, including her mobile phone and laptops. Besides sedition (IPC Section 124A) and intent to provoke rioting (Section 153), she has been booked for promoting 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 prior information about a five member cyber police team arriving from Delhi to arrest Disha, one of the early members of an environment campaign called Fridays for Future that is supported by Thunberg.

The team, including two women personnel, had arrived at the climate activist’s residence in north Bengaluru around noon on Saturday. It wasn’t until after the climate activist was escorted to the airport around 5 pm that Delhi Police informed their Bengaluru counterparts about their first arrest 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 looking for two more suspects identified as Shantanu and Nikita, and raids are being conducted in Mumbai and a couple of other places to arrest them, officials said.

Disha came on the police’s radar because her IP address figured in the list of toolkit editors. The police had sought technical inputs from Google and some internet service providers to compile the list.