New Delhi: Of the six cases against Alt News co-founder Mohammad Zubair for which Uttar Pradesh police has constituted a special investigation team, three are based on complaints by Hindutva leaders.
Two cases relate to a 2021 tweet in which Zubair flagged the use of morphed images in a show by right-wing television channel Sudarshan News, whose programming the Supreme Court once called “insidious” and a great “disservice to the nation”.
Another two cases were filed recently after Zubair drew attention to now-suspended Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Nupur Sharma’s controversial remarks about Prophet Mohammad. In one case, the First Information Report doesn’t mention Zubair as an accused at all.
On Tuesday, hours after the Supreme Court extended Zubair’s interim bail in a case registered in Sitapur where he is accused of hurting religious sentiments for calling three hate speech-accused “hatemongers”, Uttar Pradesh police announced the constitution of a special investigation team under the supervision of two Indian Police Service officials.
A departmental notification said the team would investigate six cases lodged against Zubair in five different districts of the state: Sitapur, Lakhimpur Kheri, Ghaziabad, Muzaffarnagar and Hathras. (Two cases have been filed in Hathras.)
According to the notification, Zubair allegedly made satirical comments about television anchors, hurt the religious sentiments of the Hindu community and posted inflammatory content about deities.
But scrutiny of the details of the cases how uis that most of them relate to Zubair’s work of fact-checking and documenting hate speech. The FIRs in many of the cases refer to Zubair’s Twitter activity, but do not point out specific tweets.
Sitapur: ‘Hatemongers’
The Sitapur case, the first one in which the Uttar Pradesh police initiated action against Zubair, is based on a complaint by a leader of a Hindutva organisation Rashtriya Hindu Sher Sena, who took objection to Zubair calling three saffron-clad Hindutva supremacists “hatemongers”. One of them, Bajrang Muni, had bared his genitalia and threatened to rape Muslim women – on camera. The National Commission for Women had written to the Uttar Pradesh police chief asking him to initiate action against Muni.
In court, the additional solicitor general of India, the third-highest ranking law officer of the country, while defending the police action against Zubair, had argued that Muni was a “respected religious leader…with a large following” and, hence, calling him a hate monger “raises problems”. Rebutting Zubair’s lawyer who had said his client was merely exposing hate speech and upholding secular values, he shot back: “If you were such a nice person, you could have sent a letter to police. Why did you tweet?”
As a matter of fact, Zubair had tagged the Uttar Pradesh police’s official Twitter handle on another tweet related to Muni.
Incidentally, it was a tweet by an anonymous handle that set off the storm of police action against the fact-checker. In June, the Delhi Police took cognisance of a tweet in which an anonymous user complained about their religious sentiments being hurt because Zubair had tweeted a still from a 1983 Bollywood movie. Scroll. In
