It Is Dangerous To Be Right When The Establishment Is Wrong !

BY R.K.MISRA

It is dangerous to be right when the establishment is wrong. Or so it seems.

 And wrong it was  for Mohammed Zubair, fact checker and co-founder of Alt News who was  arrested for a four year old tweet over a fortnight ago -allegedly for hurting hindu sentiments-, was granted conditional bail on July 15 by a Delhi court with the remark that a  voice of dissent is necessary for a healthy democracy. The Court noted that the Delhi police has not been able to identify  the twitter users who had been offended by the tweet in 2018. No statement of any offended person has been recorded either.” The voice of dissent is necessary for  healthy democracy. Merely for the criticism of any political party, it is not justified to invoke Section 153A and 295A ,IPC”, additional sessions judge Devender Kumar Jangala said. Section 153A pertains to promoting enmity between different groups of religion, race, place of birth, residence while 295A is about deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.

The text for which Zubair is undergoing this ordeal at the hands of the Delhi police is about a tweet of an image from a 1983   hindi movie “kisse se na kehna” which showed a Hotel’s name was changed from Honeymoon Hotel to Hanuman Hotel. The text of the tweet  said, ”Before 2014:Honeymoon Hotel. After 2014:Hanuman Hotel”. “ It is the case that the accused(Zubair) is stated to have used this to point towards a political party. In Indian democracy, political parties are open for their criticism”, the court observed.

The Court ruled that the film was certified by the Central board of film certification which is a statutory body of the government of India and is available for public view  ever since. “No complaint is  stated to have been filed till today that the said scene of the movie has hurt the feelings of a particular community of society. Hindu religion is so tolerant that its followers proudly name their institutions/organisations/facilities in the name of their holy Gods or Goddesses,” the Court observed.

Who would know this better than Delhi Police Commissioner Rakesh Asthana who is a Gujarat cadre IPS officer where it is common place to identify the owners caste on their vehicles or name their business establishments after their Gods or Goddesses. Vehicles routinely sport identities like ‘Jai parushram’(brahmins),Umiya mata(patidars),jai mataji(rajputs) and the like. 

The Delhi court’s observations are a telling commentary on  policing in the country’s capital. Though Zubair has a long haul with six other cases filed against him in various  parts of Uttar Pradesh, he has urged the Supreme Court to cancel them. His plea for relief had  apex court justices D.Y.Chandrachud and AS Bopanna give the UP government four weeks time to respond to Zubair’s plea, the same day the UP police formed  a Special Investigation Team(SIT) to probe the multiple cases against him. He has challenged the setting up of the SIT as well.

Zubair may have been a soft target but Alt News that he co-founded has a history. It is an Ahmedabad based Indian non-profit fact checking website founded in February 2017 and run by a software engineer Pratik Sinha along with Zubair. Alt news earned its spurs and rose in popularity fast because it came into being in an year when the state witnessed one of most closely contested state assembly elections in Gujarat. Pratik gave up a cushy job to plunge into this fact checking non-profit.

Pratik is the son of Mukul Sinha a human rights activist and a lawyer practicing  at the Gujarat High Court who passed away to cancer in 2014. A Masters in physics from IIT, Kanpur, he had joined the Physical research Laboratory(PRL) in Ahmedabad for his doctoral studies when fate ordained otherwise and he plunged into the trade union movement. A vocal critic of the then chief minister Narendra Modi, he legally represented the victim of the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat and even secured the conviction of politicians and police officers. The Jan Sangharsh Manch  was set up by him along with wife Nirjhari as a civil rights organization.

Mukul Sinha and his organization remained a thorn in the side of the Modi establishment in Gujarat taking up the cause of the victims of the 2002 communal riots before the Nanavaty-Mehta  judicial inquiry commission set up to probe the Godhra train carnage and the communal violence that followed thereafter. CDR(call data records)  secured by  IPS officer Rahul Sharma, who has since quit the service, and its citing as evidence was crucial in corroborating the testimonies of the Naroda patiya (Ahmedabad) massacre victims leading to some high profile convictions.

Pratik has inherited the mantle of his late father but his non-profit focuses on fact-checking which continues to expose a lot of misinformation and dis-information crowding the social media space thus throwing a spanner in many well laid plans, rubbing politicians in power on the raw side.

http://odishapostepaper.com/edition/4160/orissapost/page/9