By Betwa Sharma
New Delhi: “I’m actually confused as to how many FIRs there are now. I think 11 or 12.”
Mohammed Zubair, 42, a fact checker and father of three children, was trying to recall how many criminal cases have been registered against him over the past three years, mostly by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Uttar Pradesh (UP).
Close to two months after they registered the latest case in the western district of Ghaziabad, the UP police on 26 November informed the Allahabad High Court they had added section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023 to the first information report (FIR)—“act endangering unity, sovereignty and integrity of India”, which carries life sentence or a prison term for up to seven years and a fine.
“I’m used to it but ‘endangering sovereignty’ is too much,” said Zubair, co-founder of the fact checking website Alt News.
“It is publicly calling me an ‘anti-national,’” he said, using a term which the Hindu right-wing deployed against critics of the BJP government after it came to power in 2014, following which Islamophobia and hate speech has become commonplace and India’s position on global democracy and press freedom indexes have fallen.
On Sunday, the Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), a Delhi-based NGO, said the Delhi Police had registered a case against its general secretary Nadeem Khan for a speech he delivered in Hyderabad in November and they attempted to detain him without arrest or notice in Bengaluru.
The number of FIRs against Zubair that we calculated were 12; two cases in Delhi, including one registered under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) for tweeting the blurred image of a minor. The police found no criminality. Nine in Uttar Pradesh, and one in Chhattisgarh (the same POCSO case.)
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
