New Delhi: The Editors Guild of India condemned the filing of FIRs by the Uttar Pradesh Police against online media publication The Wire and several other journalists, for their tweets on an assault on an elderly Muslim man in Loni, Ghaziabad earlier this month.
In a statement issued Thursday, the guild said, “It is the duty of the journalists to report on the basis of sources and in case facts become contested later on, to report the emerging versions and facets. For police to wade into such professional calls by journalists and attribute criminality to their actions is destructive of freedom of speech, which is constitutionally protected and is an entrenched feature of the rule of law.”
In a video that went viral on 14 June, 72-year-old Abdul Samad Saifi was seen being thrashed and his beard being chopped off. In another widely-shared video, the man alleged he was forced to chant ‘Jai Shree Ram’. The police said this did not happen and that Saifi’s formal complaint filed on 7 June did not mention this charge.
“Subsequently, there was an alternate version offered by the UP Police claiming that the assault was borne out of a dispute regarding a talisman that the elderly man had sold to some people, which was also reported by these media organizations and journalists,” the Guild said.
“It is quite evident that the police has been discriminatory in targeting those media organizations and journalists — when thousands had tweeted the video — that have been critical of the government and it’s policies,” the statement, signed by Seema Mustafa, guild president, and Sanjay Kapoor, general secretary, said.
Demanding immediate withdrawal of the FIRs, the Guild also condemned the “wanton misuse of laws to criminalize reporting and dissent to harass independent media”.
Read the full statement here:
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