Journalists are getting run over as they are being bashed with heavy sections of the Indian Penal Code due to their tweets.
In a similar case, Siddharth Varadarajan, the editor of “The Wire” is under scrutiny and has a police case filed against him after he posted a Twitter update of one of the articles of his news website that spoke about the death of the farmer in the Republic Day’s tractor rally.
In the FIR, the journalist has been charged guilty of shoving accusations, assertions prejudicial to the national-integration and remarks welcoming public violence and mischief.
The case has been filed by a local resident of Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, the same village the farmer who died in Delhi belonged to.
In the news report that “The Wire” had written based on the statements of the deceased farmer’s family, it mentioned the family’s claims that their family member was shot to death by the police opposed to the tractor turned a story that the cops said. They also alleged that one of the doctors who carried out the autopsy revealed the same to them but added that “the hands of the doctors are tied”.
However, a signed statement was later released by the doctors who conducted the postmortem denying any such conversation with the family or anyone else for that matter.
The Uttar Pradesh police says that the postmortem revealed that he did not suffer a bullet injury as alleged by the family. ANI quoted Avinash Chandra, a senior police officer of Bareilly region as saying, “He succumbed to the injuries he received after his tractor turned turtle.”
Social media was booming with the CCTV recording of the event that unfolded and brought about the death of the farmer. In the video, the tractor can be seen overturning during the rally in Delhi.
“The Wire” editor has questioned as to how the police can charge him for publishing the public statements of the deceased’s family member with no indulgence of his own in tweaking it.
He tweeted, “What’s the IPC provision for “malicious prosecution”? Here is the UP Police indulging in it, filing an FIR against me for tweeting about what the grandfather of farmer who was killed in the tractor parade had said on the record!”
Mr. Varadarajan becomes the 7th journalist to be charged in this matter. Previously, Mrinal Pande, Anant Nath, Rajdeep Sardesai, Vinod K Jose and Paresh Nath were accused of criminal conspiracy, sedition and promoting enmity through the various IPCs, according to the case lodged in Uttar Pradesh’s Noida.
Reacting to the UP cops’ take on the issue and opposing their action, Seema Mustafa, the Editor’s Guild chief said, “The journalists have been specifically targeted for reporting the accounts pertaining to the death of one of the protestors on their personal social media handles as well as those of the publications they lead and represent. It must be noted that on the day of the protest and high action, several reports were emerging from eyewitnesses on the ground as well as from the police, and therefore it was only natural for journalists to report all the details as they emerged. This is in line with established norms of journalistic practice.”
