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Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh: Umar Khalid, a 31-year-old law student, shared a Facebook post at seven in the morning on 10 June 2022 with photos of young men standing near a bus, announcing his arrival at a three-day-convention organised by the Student Islamic Organisation at the Jamiatul Falah religious school in Bilariaganj in eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) district of Azamgarh.
“With a big and strong team, three-day UP convention of the SIO-2022, Jamiatul Falah Azamgarh,” he wrote.
Nine hours later, a few minutes after 3:30 pm, Khalid did a live stream of the event in Azamgarh, around 200 km away from his home city of Prayagraj, where a rally to protest the derogatory remarks made by a leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) about the Prophet Muhammad turned violent. Over 400 people were arrested in connection with the violent protests in the BJP-ruled state at the time.
While accusing Muslim activists of planning the violence in Prayagraj, the UP police have described a violent agitation in the Muslim neighbourhood of Atala in the two first information reports (FIRs) they have registered naming them. They said that a mob of thousands with children took to the streets, throwing stones, shooting pistols, and lobbing bombs, gravely injuring three security personnel and destroying police motorcycles.
Residents disputed the police version of events, claiming the violence mainly was stone-throwing, not the “pistol-and-bomb” violence the police claimed.
In interviews with the media at the time, the senior superintendent of police (SSP), Prayagraj, Ajay Kumar, and district magistrate Sanjay Kumar Khatri said some young men hurled stones, and the situation was brought under control with the use of minimal force. They said that a few police personnel had minor injuries, and one dilapidated cycle rickshaw was set on fire and was put out.
As the media started reporting that the police suspected the role of ten people in the Prayagraj violence and were looking for him, Khalid quote-tweeted a news clip and said: “I’ve been 200 km away in Azamgarh since last night. Please don’t spread rumours of this kind and incite the public. I’m not part of any kind of protest, nor am I in favour of this kind of incident.”
A few hours later, Khalid posted his Twitter message on his Facebook page: “Godi media reports anything from anywhere.”
Shamsul Islam, Khalid’s lawyer, who has filed for anticipatory bail to stop the UP police from arresting his client, told Article 14, “When a person is 200 km away, and he is doing a Facebook live, how can he be at the place of occurrence? All these things are lies.”
A month after the violence, the main accused and their families declined to speak because they feared the police would book another male relative. Lawyers, meanwhile, say the police have strategically targeted critics of the BJP’s majoritarian politics, those who organised and participated in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2019, and the farm laws, crushing the last vestiges of dissent in the city. In the past three years, the activists have been booked in connection with either the CAA-NRC or the farmers’ protests.
In the applications for bail and anticipatory bail filed for some of the accused activists in Prayagraj, Shamsul has cited the messages that Khalid posted from Azamgarh, CCTV photos of a political leader at home on the day of the violence, a Facebook post by a social activist asking people not to come out to protest, their absence from police footage of the violence, and the 13-hour long delay in filing the first FIR describing the violence, to demonstrate the weakness of the police case.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here