The FIR has accused the web news portal’s chief of making imputations, assertions prejudicial to national-integration and statements conducing to public mischief.
After he posted a tweet sharing a news report filed by the web portal regarding the death of a farmer during the tractor rally on Republic Day, a police case has been filed against “The Wire” editor Siddharth Varadarajan. The FIR has accused the web news portal’s chief of making imputations, assertions prejudicial to national-integration and statements conducing to public mischief.
The case was filed on a complaint by a local resident of Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, the same place where the deceased farmer belonged to.
The portal had carried a story based on the comments from farmers’ family who alleged that he had been shot. The family had claimed that one of the doctors who conducted the postmortem on the body, had confirmed this to them but said: “the hands of the doctors are tied”. According to Delhi Police, the farmer died after his tractor had overturned.
After these developments, the doctors who had conducted the postmortem issued a signed statement denying they spoke to the family or anyone else about the postmortem.
“What’s the IPC provision for “malicious prosecution”? Here is the UP Police indulging in it, filing an FIR against me for tweeting about what the grandfather of farmer who was killed in the tractor parade had said on the record!,” Mr Varadarajan has tweeted, sharing the news of the FIR against him.
Siddharth Varadarajan is the seventh journalist to be accused over the issue.
Earlier, in a case filed in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, Rajdeep Sardesai, Mrinal Pande, Paresh Nath, Anant Nath and Vinod K Jose were accused of sedition, criminal conspiracy and promoting enmity under the Indian Penal Code.
Editors’ Guild chief Seema Mustafa, objecting to the police action, had said: “The journalists have been specifically targeted for reporting the accounts pertaining to the death of one of the protestors on their personal social media handles as well as those of the publications they lead and represent. It must be noted that on the day of the protest and high action, several reports were emerging from eyewitnesses on the ground as well as from the police, and therefore it was only natural for journalists to report all the details as they emerged. This is in line with established norms of journalistic practice.”
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