Requesting a pardon for 19-year-old Sulabh Goyal, who was arrested last week for sending a threatening e-mail to President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a petition signed by 20,000 residents of Ashoknagar in Madhya Pradesh has been forwarded to the President by the district administration.

Interestingly, the petition mentions that the third year B.Com student took the step after he felt harassed as he had become a butt of jokes among his friends as he shared his name with Sulabh Shauchalaya, a chain of public utilities. The petition says that Sulabh Goyal had recently stopped going to college and tuitions due to the repeated taunts of his peers.

"He wrote to the President earlier requesting him to change the name of the public utility chain. This was after he had approached the municipal authorities too saying that at least the name of the utilities in the city be changed. When he received no response, he resorted to writing the threatening e-mail to the President on July 19," says the petition signed by many schoolchildren and intellectuals.

"I received the representation and have forwarded it to the President's office. It is now up to the President to consider it," Ashoknagar district collector Mukesh Gupta told he Indian Express over the phone. "Residents came out on the streets in the last two days saying that the whole town was feeling ashamed due to Sulabh's act and hoped that the learned President would forgive him. Sulabh is just a child," Gupta said.

Upon his arrest from Indore on July 26, Sulabh had told mediapersons in Delhi that he was sorry for the act. He had created a new e-mail id from a cyber cafe to send the mail to the President's official web address on July 29 at 4:51 pm. He was handed over to the special cell of Delhi Police, which sent him to Tihar Jail after interrogating him for a day.

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