On June 27, Indian authorities arrested journalist and fact-checker Mohammed Zubair of Alt News because a 4-year-old tweet of his, they claimed, mocked Hinduism and inflamed already-tense religious strife in the country.
Zubair, who is Muslim, is popular on Twitter for his frequent debunks of anti-Islamic propaganda, often purveyed by Hindu nationalist groups including the Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling faction and party of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Many speculated the given reason for the arrest was a pretext to file other charges against Zubair. The theory would seem to withstand scrutiny given that over the weekend Indian authorities extended his five-day arrest to 14 additional days of “judicial detention” and pivoted the charges to criminal conspiracy and disappearance of evidence. Delhi police also searched Zubair’s house.
“They cannot file a complaint against me for writing a story because we have facts with us in our stories,” Zubair told Forbidden Stories, a nonprofit news outlet that highlights the work of journalists facing threats for their coverage, last year. “They cannot attack us on the story that we’ve written, so they are looking to attack me for any other unrelated tweet.”
Alt News co-founder and editor Pratik Sinha called the arrest an “attempt to stop us from doing what we do.” Sinha is facing unrelated legal attacks.
Since then, the donation platform Razorpay disabled Alt News’ account after receiving a “request from police authorities.” Razorpay is a critical funding source for the outlet, which bills itself as entirely crowdfunded. The Indian government also accused Alt News of illegally receiving foreign money, including from Pakistan, in a claim the outlet denies.
“These allegations are categorically false. Our payment platform through which we receive donations does not allow receipt of funds from foreign sources and we have received donations from Indian bank accounts only,” Alt News wrote in a statement posted to Twitter.
In addition to hundreds of thousands of followers, Zubair has a number of detractors, including the BJP and other Hindu nationalist groups even further to the right. Zubair gained popularity for debunking claims of the far-right and sharing videos of anti-Muslim behavior.
In one video shared on Zubair’s Twitter account, a Muslim woman arrives at a university donning a naqib, a garment typically worn by Muslim women that covers everything but their eyes. Immediately she is set upon and followed by a large group of student demonstrators twirling scarlet shawls above their heads and yelling. When the woman yells Allahu akbar (meaning “God is great” in Arabic), a broadcast journalist runs over to film her, with scores of student protesters at his heels. Across India, the scarlet shawl is a symbolic protest of the use of hijabs and niqabs in schools.
The account that alerted Delhi police of Zubair’s 2018 meme tweet, @balajikijaiin, had zero followers and has since been deleted.
“@Delhipolice linking our god Hanuman ji with Honey Moon (a 1973 Bollywood comedy) is a direct insult to Hindus because he is brahmachari. @DCP_CCC_Delhi kindly take action against this guy,” the tweet read.
Zubair was originally called in for questioning on an unrelated case, for which he had already been granted immunity from arrest, when he was arrested for the tweet.
According to the Reporters Without Borders’ 2022 World Press Freedom Index, India ranks 150th for press freedom out of 180 recognized countries.
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