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13-07-2024
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI: Media watchdogs in India have accused the police in Uttar Pradesh state of “grave overreach” for filing cases against journalists after they wrote about the alleged lynching of a Muslim man last week in social media posts.
Police in the northern state’s Shamli district charged two journalists Wasim Akram Tyagi and his cousin Zakir Ali Tyagi for commenting on the killing of Firoz Qureshi in the district’s Jalalabad town.
The journalists were charged with causing “hatred and anger” in society. Three other Muslims who shared their social media posts were also named in the first information report (FIR) filed by the police. None of them have been arrested so far.
Wasim, a reporter with Hind News newspaper in Shamli, told media on Thursday he was “shocked” when he heard that charges had been filed against him over the alleged lynching.
“Now, as journalists, if we can’t call murder a murder, what should we call it, then? If a journalist is not going to raise questions, who will? … If we are going to be charged for this, it raises questions on press freedom,” the 36-year-old told media.
“The impact this will have is that anytime you write something, you will have to think twice: What if an FIR is filed over writing this or that?”
Zakir, 25, also rejected the police charges, saying he merely disseminated information that had already been shared by the Qureshi family. He said he was “not surprised” by the FIR against him.
“I was expecting the FIR for a long time because I had been only posting and writing about lynching cases recorded across India,” he told media, adding that this was not the first time a police case was registered against him.
Cases of mob lynching of Muslims by Hindu groups and mobs, mainly under the pretext of protecting cows, an animal considered holy by a large section of Hindus, spiked after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. Dozens have been killed in such attacks.
Zakir said the people charged by the police in the Shamli case, including him, were being targeted because they were Muslims.
“Everything we wrote, all the questions we have raised, were also written or used in videos by Hindu journalists,” he told media but “no FIR was registered against them.”
