Police in the Indian capital, New Delhi, arrested a Muslim journalist on Monday evening on charges of insulting religious sentiments, in what many have described as the latest crackdown on press freedom under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
Mohamad Zubair, one of the founders of fact-checking website AltNews, was arrested for a tweet that police said deliberately insulted “the deity of a particular religion.” and the journalist was arrested for one day.
The incident quickly sparked outrage as activists, journalists and opposition politicians took to social media to denounce it as press persecution and call for the immediate release of Mohamed Zubair.
“In a democracy where everyone has the right to freedom of speech and expression, using such draconian laws as tools against journalists is unjustified,” DigiPop, a network of Indian news organizations, said in a statement. “The arrest of one voice for the truth will only lead to the fact that a thousand new voices will appear,” Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition Congress, wrote on Twitter. Prateik Sinha, another co-founder of Alt News, confirmed that Zubair was arrested without any notice to the police, which is a legal requirement for the departments in which he was detained.
Alt News, founded in 2017 as a non-profit organization, is India’s leading fact-checking news site and has built a reputation for reporting hate speech and exposing disinformation, especially from Hindu nationalists. Its founders often face online phishing and threats from right-wing groups, some of which are linked to the BJP.
Several similar cases have been brought against Zubair in the past. Earlier this month, he was accused by police of calling some Hindu monks “hate sellers,” news site The Wire reported. Hindu monks have made inflammatory statements about Muslims, and at least one has called for the “genocide” of minority sects. The monks were arrested and then released on bail. Zubair was also one of the first journalists to draw attention to controversial comments made by a spokesman for the now suspended Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against the Prophet Muhammad, which sparked a diplomatic spat between the Modi administration. The Indian government has distanced itself from the spokesman’s statements after they provoked strong reactions from many Muslim countries.
India slipped eight places to 150th out of 180 countries in this year’s Reporters Without Borders press freedom rankings.
Zubair’s arrest comes two days after the arrest of human rights lawyer and activist Testa Setalwad by the Gujarat Anti-Terror Police Department. Setalwad was arrested on Saturday on charges of “forgery and fabrication of evidence” in a case related to the 2002 riots against Muslims in Gujarat. Modi, who was Gujarat’s chief minister at the time, denied the allegations and was acquitted after government investigators and courts ruled there was no evidence against Modi.
Sittalwad has long campaigned for justice for the victims of the riots, which killed nearly a thousand people, most of them Muslims, and several international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have condemned Sittalwad’s arrest by Indian authorities.
