Shoot the messenger: UP Police’s motto?

While the Uttar Pradesh government seems to slow-pedal the case against the Muzaffarnagar schoolteacher who ordered her students to slap a fellow Muslim child, the UP police has done what it does best – target the victim or the messenger who brings a violation to the country’s notice. In this case, it has acted swiftly against the messenger by filing a case against Mohammed Zubair of the fact-checking website AltNews, for violation of the Juvenile Justice Act. The charge is that he disclosed the identity of the boy when he made the video of the beating public. The website conducted an interview with the boy’s father who mentioned his son’s name. The letter of the law may have been violated but the question to be asked is whether there was violation of its spirit. Without the video, the story would not have caught the nation’s attention, and many people would not have believed that a teacher would get a student beaten up by other children in an apparent act of communal punishment. 

Zubair has been targeted before by the government for bringing inconvenient facts to light. He was arrested last year in one case after another to ensure that he could not make bail at all, until the Supreme Court intervened to grant him bail in all the cases. In this case, too, he has been targeted for taking inconvenient news to the people. Zubair should actually have been complimented for bringing the matter to public attention. It is the teacher, Tripta Tyagi, against whom strict action should have been initiated. Instead, mild provisions of the law have been invoked against her. She has not been arrested, and there are even attempts for a patch-up and reconciliation in the matter. It appears that it was not her action but talking about it that is punishable in today’s India. 

This happened in Manipur, too. A case was filed against a person who made public the video of two women being paraded naked. The visuals shocked the nation and forced Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make a comment on it and promise action, after having remained silent on the Manipur situation for three months. Any purported offence or action has to be seen in its context and from the perspective of public interest. Both Zubair and the Manipur whistleblower brought to the nation’s attention serious violations that should have been dealt with. If the importance and impact of the incidents reported by the two are considered, the violation of the law they are accused of is insignificant. But these messengers, not the perpetrators of the crimes, have become the authorities’ targets.