Pavneet Kumar Singh claims to be national vice-president of Rashtra Swabhiman Dal has also posted a picture with UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath
A month after vigilante website Altnews reported that a pro-Hindutva group called “Hindutva Vaarta” listed the profiles of over 100 interfaith couples calling for “hunting them down”, HW News in a shocking incident has found another such grave invasion of privacy.
On Wednesday, a message was posted on the Facebook group named “Vote 4 BJP” along with a picture that apparently is a marriage certificate of an interfaith couple. The post appeared on the right-wing group at around 9.12 PM. The message shared with the image began with “Jai Shri Ram” and called for stopping the Hindu women mentioned in the marriage certificate from “Love Jihad”. The post calls the woman “a fool” and asks the followers of the group to share it in big numbers so that the post will reach the family members of the women.
Now, this is not only an invasion of privacy but can also be life-threatening for the inter-faith couple. The marriage certificate picture clearly spells out the full names of the Bride (Hindu) and Groom (Muslim), their age (which is above the consenting age), their residential and permanent address along with their pictures. It also mentions the date of marriage and has the stamp of official authorization of their marriage.
In the recent past, the Love Jihad issue has fired up. In the month of December last year, a video of a Hindu man from Rajasthan’s Rajsamand named “Shambhunath” beating a Muslim man and later burning him alive on camera had gone viral. Shambhunath had killed the man on the suspicion of Love Jihad. The video though led to Shambhunath’s arrest, thousands of youth in the region turned up to support Shambhunath and collected money for his bail.
Considering the seriousness of the matter of divulging details of interfaith couples on a public platform, HW News decided to dig further. The post was shared by a Facebook user who goes by the name Pavneet Kumar Singh. To see whether the account is fake or genuine one, we checked the Facebook profile. On the top of the profile is a cover photo in which the man is found sitting with three of his friends, one of them being Dipak Sharma whose video had gone viral on facebook several months ago. Dipak Sharma was also accused of kidnapping and beating up a boy for allegedly making memes of gods and goddesses.
The four of them are sitting with a saffron robe clad Sadhvi Prachi who is a right-wing leader known for her controversial remarks on Muslims and Love Jihad. While going through the timeline of Pavneet Kumar Singh we found several messages in support of Shanmbhunath whose Love Jihad killing case we mentioned above. The man who claims to be national vice-president of Rashtra Swabhiman Dal has also posted a picture with UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath.
In the case we mentioned above, the post received 67 shares and four comments, one of which calls for burning the women mentioned in the marriage certificate alive.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that such sensitive information was shared on a pro-BJP group. There are a number of pages and groups on facebook that regularly post abusive, communally charged, hate-filled messages that can incite communal violence in the society. These groups also have large memberships. In this case, the group has membership as big as 924k members.
The number of such groups and pages have risen alarmingly in the past few years. These pages post provocative messages and certain times use the space to spread fake news and false propaganda. At a time when data privacy has become an essential topic worldwide, it is time that such matters of grave concern are taken seriously.
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