The South Asian Women in Media (India) condemns the arrest of Teesta Setalvad, secretary and co-founder of Citizens for Justice and Peace, and of Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of Alt News, the fact-checking media organisation, and expresses solidarity with them. SAWM India seeks their immediate release and demands that all charges against them be dropped.
Setalvad’s arrest came hours after the Supreme Court of India dismissed a petition by Zakia Jafri, the wife of Congress parliamentarian Ehsan Jafri, who was killed in the 2002 riots in Gujarat. The petition was filed after the 2012 clean chit to then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. It sought a probe into an alleged larger conspiracy behind the riots. Setalvad was a co-petitioner in the case as a representative of the CJP, an organisation formed to seek justice for the victims of the Gujarat riots.
While dismissing their petition on June 24, the Supreme Court said the proccedings were pursued “to keep the pot boiling, obviously for ulterior design”. It also said “all those involved in such abuse of process, need to be in the dock and proceeded with in accordance with the law”.
In an interview after the Supreme Court decision, Home Minister Amit Shah said Modi had suffered long years at the hands of opposition parties, some NGOs and “motivated elements” to clear his name.
Setalvad’s arrest followed shortly thereafter. The FIR in the case quotes heavily from the Supreme Court judgement, treating it virtually as an order for the arrest of Setalvad, former Gujarat DGP B P Sreekumar, and the already imprisoned IPS officer Sanjeev Bhatt.
Also disturbing are the Supreme Court’s remarks. The nearly decade long delay in deciding the case is hardly to be blamed on the petitioners. The Court ‘s remarks bear ominous portents for those who knock on its doors with real or perceived grievances against the State.
The alacrity with which the Gujarat Police jumped to the arrest of a rights activist with over two decades of public service forms part of a disquieting chronology. The decision to dispatch officials of the state police’s anti-terror squad to Mumbai for the purpose is ominous, considering the current trend of describing all those opposed to the government as “urban Naxals” and their activities as “terrorism”.
It is in this atmosphere that police forces under BJP governments across the country appear to be waiting for the smallest opportunity to crack down on dissenters. The Delhi Police’s decision to arrest Mohammed Zubair on charges of hate speech for a tweet in 2018 in which he reproduced a poster from a 1983 Bollywood comedy film ‘Kisi Se Na Kehna‘ is strange, to say the least.
He has been arrested on the complaint of a twitter handle whose only tweet in the eight months of its existence has been to complain against Zubair.
Altnews has been providing yeoman service as a fact checking site, and Zubair is one of its pillars. In recent days, he had become the target of a social media campaign for his role in exposing the hate speech of suspended BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma.
Incidentally, Sharma, against whom too Delhi Police has registered an FIR for hate speech, has not yet been arrested and is apparently untraceable!
Both arrests, of Setalvad and Zubair, make a mockery of the G-7 Plus 4 statement on “Resilient Democracies”, that India signed on Monday after the G-7 summit in Germany.
Among other promises in the statement to advance democratic practices, India has signed on to “protecting the feedom of expression online and offline and ensuring a free and independent media landscape…”; “guarding the freedom, independence and diversity of civil society actors, speaking out against threats to civic space and respecting freedom of association and peaceful assembly”; and to “protecting freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief and promoting inter-faith dialogue”.
SAWM India believes the arrests of Setalvad and Zubair go against the letter and spirit of this statement as well as India’s own constitutional guarantees and freedoms.
Both Setalvad and Zubair must be released without delay and the charges against them withdrawn.
SAWM India calls on all other civil society groups to join in this demand for their release.