Former cricketer named three Muslim names as the people who lynched tribal man Madhu in Kerala, ignoring the other 13 Hindus & Christians who’re also suspected.
New Delhi: Virender Sehwag created a stir Saturday through a controversial tweet that named only Muslim members of a group that lynched Madhu, a tribal man in Kerala.
The tweet said “a mob of Ubaid, Hussain and Abdul Kareem” lynched Madhu, but failed to mention the others accused. Sehwag faced an immediate backlash for being communal, as the group included 16 people, including Hindus and Christians.
The outrage forced Sehwag to post a follow-up tweet and apologise. He said that “non acceptance of a fault” is itself a fault, and that he didn’t intend for the tweet to be communal. But by that point, he had already been widely criticised by the likes of Ramachandra Guha on Twitter for providing incomplete and misleading information.
Subsequently, both tweets were deleted.
Who posted the tweet?
The man believed to look after Sehwag’s social media activity, radio journalist Amritanshu Gupta, denied posting the controversial tweet.
The former cricketer’s Twitter bio provides Gupta’s contact number for “digital and social media” enquiries. When reached by ThePrint, Gupta said that he doesn’t put out any of Sehwag’s tweets, and that there is a different social media team that is involved in posting content on Sehwag’s social media. “I look after his business,” Gupta said.
Not the first instance
This is not the first time that Sehwag has courted controversy online. He famously took a dig at Gurmehar Kaur, posting a response to her statement that war had killed her father and not Pakistan by posting, “I didn’t score two triple centuries, my bat did”. Kaur was receiving rape and death threats from Right-wing groups at that point, and Sehwag was again condemned for supporting hate against her.
Madhu, a mentally challenged man from Kerala, was killed for allegedly stealing rice. His lynching, which took place in one of the more progressive states in India, caused national outrage. The group of 16 people arrested for the crime included men of different faiths.
Earlier this year, five random Muslim names were accused of attacking a school bus in Gurugram during the Padmaavat protests, but turned out to be false information.