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The witch-hunt of India’s journalists and fact-checkers

29th Jul 2022
The witch-hunt of India’s journalists and fact-checkers

Photo: Mohammed Zubair and Pratik Sinha co-founders of Alt News. (Credit: @ PratikSinha/Twitter)

Shauqueen Mizaj

History teaches that fascist authoritarian regimes invariably suppress dissent by any means. India’s incumbent BJP government demonstrated this in recent years by reviving colonial-era laws to crackdown on critics.

Narendra Modi’s government is notorious for its far-right Hindutva nationalists’ agenda that dehumanises Muslims and marginalises them as the “other.”

Their voices are lost, and their allies are hounded indefinitely, as evidenced by the arrest and prosecution of journalists and outspoken activists using sedition charges, a relic of the British colonial regime.

According to Human Rights Watch, more than 7,000 people have been charged with sedition since the BJP government took office in 2014.

Mohammed Zubair, 33, a prominent Muslim journalist and co-founder of the popular fact-checking website Alt-News, was arrested on June 27 for purportedly “hurting religious sentiments” in a tweet posted in 2018 that was recently retweeted by an anonymous account. T

he Twitter handle created last October under the name, Hanuman Bhakt [Monkey god Hanuman worshipper], claimed that Zubair’s tweet was a “direct insult” to Hindus and demanded action against him. In the tweet, Zubair had commented on a photograph of a hotel signboard that had been changed from ‘Honeymoon Hotel’ to ‘Hanuman Hotel.’ At the time of the police complaint, the anonymous Twitter handle had just a single follower. By the time the complaint was lodged, it was deactivated but was revived and has over 1,600 followers.

Zubair had posted emails from Twitter a few days before his arrest saying some of his tweets criticising hate comments by Hindu leaders were being “withheld,” and could not be seen in India on request from the law enforcement authorities. In court, he claimed he had been arrested for his work and Muslim faith. A vocal critic of the Modi government,

Zubair fact-checks and debunks fake news and disinformation through his website Alt-News, which he co-founded with a former software engineer, Pratik Sinha, in 2017.

The website has played a crucial role in the daily busting of fake news that spreads misinformation and hate about religion, caste and unscientific myths.

Zubair, a prolific tweeter with over half a million followers, has been under attack by Hindu nationalists for calling out frequent hate speeches by several Hindu monks and Hindutva politicians, including Yati Narsinghanand, Mahant Bajrang Muni, and Anand Swaroop.

With over 3,000 articles viewed over 60 million times, Alt-News and Zubair have been under the radar, particularly due to their focus on fake news targeting minority Muslims.

Sifting through photographs and videos of hate, violence, lies and propaganda, to trace back to the original images and videos is taxing. However, Zubair, an expert in digital forensics, did it diligently. Given the current atmosphere prevailing in the country, it was risky for the Muslim fact-checker to continue doing his job.

The timing and motive of his arrest raise several questions. It was his widely shared tweet that drew global attention to the BJP spokesperson, Nupur Sharma’s televised inflamatory comments against Prophet Muhammad in May. Her outburst caused a nationwide uproar and protests, leading to violence.

It also placed the BJP in a diplomatic tight spot with numerous Muslim countries, forcing the party to eventually suspend her. According to the research website, Article 14, Zubair had not named or tagged Sharma when calling out her comments and had instead tagged the news channel Times Now, which ran the debate, its anchor and the Managing Director of Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd (the Times Group).

While calls for her arrest grew, she fled into hiding. However, her supporters began calling for Zubair’s arrest after Sharma blamed him for inciting hatred against her, which had resulted in ‘rape and death threats’ against her on Twitter.

That’s when hashtags such as #arrestzubair began trending. The police then arrested Zubair over the four-year-old tweet.

The photograph in the tweet was a screengrab from a 1983 Bollywood romantic comedy, Kissi Se Na Kehna, by acclaimed director Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Nobody has taken offence at the movie all these four decades. Zubair’s arrest was condemned by opposition parties, journalists, and activists as well as by international rights NGOs.

A spokesperson for UN chief António Guterres said that “journalists should not be jailed for what they write, tweet, and say.” Sharma who spewed vile comments is walking free till date while Zubair who shared her comments was dragged from one jurisdiction to another by a vindictive State.

With a total of six FIRs lodged against him in the state of Uttar Pradesh, five of them for his Twitter posts calling out hate crimes against Muslims and the last one, a rioting case, he shuttled between prisons and courts. Zubair was finally granted bail by the Supreme Court on July 20 in all six cases filed against him.

The incumbent government continues to systematically eradicate constitutionally enshrined freedoms of expression, the press, and religion in its pursuit of establishing a Hindu supremacist nation as demonstrated by Zubair’s arrest for drawing widespread attention to Sharma’s comments.

 

 

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Over 120 people attended a landmark conference on the media reporting of Islam and Muslims. It was held jointly by The Muslim News and Society of Editors in London on September 15.

The Muslim News Awards for Excellence 2015 was held on March in London to acknowledge British Muslim and non-Muslim contributions to the society.

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The Muslim News Awards for Excellence event is to acknowledge British Muslim and non-Muslim contributions to society. Over 850 people from diverse background, Muslim and non-Muslim, attended the gala dinner.

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