New Delhi: “Nisha Jindal” was quite a Facebook celebrity, with over 10,000 followers and 4,000 “friends”, and posts that were allegedly often provocative and incendiary.
However, ‘her’ social media presence has been discovered to be one big charade after an allegedly misleading post about the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ravi Pujar, who was arrested from Raipur Friday, is said to have told police that he did it all for fun. He has been booked under Sections 153 A and 295A of IPC, which pertain to promoting enmity and outraging religious feelings, besides relevant sections of the Information Technology Act.
Among his over 10,000 followers and nerarly 4,000 friends were some IAS and IPS officers of Chhattisgarh, according to the police.
To ensure his galaxy of followers know the truth, police got Pujar to post a photo of himself from the account with the following caption: “I am Nisha Jindal and I am in police custody.”
The post has since gone viral, with more than 8,000 likes.
Senior police officers involved in his arrest told ThePrint that they started monitoring the profile after receiving some tipoffs about its posts of communal nature.
“He had been posting some communal messages along with pictures of sanitisers and masks. One senior IAS officer also sent me his communal posts,” said Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Arif Sheikh, one of the personnel who arrested Ravi.
Then, the police claimed, they sensed something amiss last month when a post from the account claimed the “WHO is going to donate 10,000 ventilators to India”.
“We had been keeping an eye on him since last month. He got us confused because one day he would pose as a WHO adviser, then as a UN Security Council co-adviser, a scholar from Harvard University… and next day he would post photos of masks distribution,” said Additional Superintendent of Police Pankaj Chandra.
Following the WHO post, Chandra added, “We began to wonder who this person is. We also wrote to Facebook, but didn’t get any reply. So, we started tracing him with the help of cyber experts.”
According to Chandra, the police also called up some of the international institutions where “Jindal” claimed to work. “When they denied a Nisha Jindal works with them, we realised the truth may be something else.”
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An engineering dropout
Posts on Pujar’s Facebook profile, which featured Pakistani actress Mirha Pasha’s photo as the display picture, were not restricted to communal content. Sometimes, they appeared to woo potential suitors — “I am a 35-year-old young, beautiful and single lady”.
At other times, they sought to emphasise Jindal’s purported stellar credentials as an expert of international renown, associated with such bodies as the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund.
To make the profile seem more legitimate, Pujar allegedly created as many as six fake IDs of purported family members.
Police have seized four mobile phones and a laptop from Pujar.
According to police, Pujar is an engineering dropout who enrolled for a BE course in 2009, but could never pass. When he was arrested, they said, he only made two remarks, “I used to do all this for fun” and “People would have never appreciated my intellectual capacity if I had posted as my own self. So, I started posting as a woman.”
The son of a government employee, he is said to belong to a “humble family” that, according to police, was “humiliated” when they found out about his shenanigans.
The Nisha Jindal Facebook ID is now being probed and all the information being copied, the police told ThePrint, adding the profile will be deleted after his interrogation. Tech experts are restoring the deleted chats for further information.
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Nice story.
But aaj bhi bhut sari nakli profiles ha jo logo ko gumrah karke pesa lutte ha.