Under scanner since Nuh violence, Sudarshan News employee’s X account suspended

Sagar Kumar’s account was suspended & posts deleted at request of Faridabad police who say several such accounts inciting ‘communal hatred’ are under the scanner.

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New Delhi: Micro-blogging platform X, formerly Twitter, has suspended the account of Sudarshan News employee Sagar Kumar at the request of the Faridabad police.

In a press statement Friday, Faridabad police said Kumar’s account was suspended and posts removed since he was posting misleading information on communal issues, which led to incitement of anger among the public.

Sources in the force told ThePrint that Kumar was under the scanner for at least four months for his inflammatory posts, pursuant to which the department wrote to X on 10 January seeking action under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

The police in its statement also said that the crackdown against social media accounts sharing inflammatory messages is not limited to Kumar and that several other such accounts are under the scanner. 

Kumar’s account, the police added, was being “monitored” since after he made inflammatory posts during the communal violence in Haryana’s Nuh last August, which claimed six lives and left at least 20 injured. ThePrint earlier reported on the sequence of events leading up to the violence and how a police investigation revealed the role provocative videos and posts on social media played in stoking tensions.

Bajrang Dal member from Faridabad Raj Kumar alias Bittu Bajrangi, who was later arrested by the police but is now out on bail, was among those arrested for allegedly stoking communal tension in the district prior to the violence. 

After his brother Mahesh Panchal succumbed to burn injuries at AIIMS last week, Bajrangi claimed in a police complaint that his death was caused by an attack on him by unknown assailants in Faridabad last month. However, the police maintain that a Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the case was not able to corroborate the allegations despite analysing footage from 35 CCTV cameras and questioning nearly 50 people.

Kumar, police sources told ThePrint, had been citing the alleged attack on Panchal to “instigate one specific community against the other by citing the death of Panchal and urging one community to initiate acts of violence against one specific community”.

(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)