A Muslim journalist accused of disparaging Hindu religious leaders on Twitter was granted bail by India’s top court on Friday, after his arrest last month raised questions about press freedom.
However, Mohammed Zubair, who co-founded the fact-checking website Alt News and frequently tweets about the growing marginalisation of India’s Muslim minority, will continue to be detained by police as a result of a different complaint that was made in the nation’s capital, New Delhi.
According to a court document, Zubair was accused of hurting religious feelings by labelling a group of Hindu religious leaders as “hate mongers” in a complaint that was filed in June in the Sitapur district of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
A two-judge Supreme Court bench decided on the Sitapur complaint and granted Zubair five days’ bail while directing him to refrain from tweeting and tampering with any electronic evidence.
A Twitter account complained that Zubair had insulted Hindus in a post from 2018 regarding the renaming of a hotel after the Hindu monkey god Hanuman, leading to his initial arrest.
The arrest of journalist Mohammed Zubair was motivated by at least 757 anonymous Twitter accounts that were connected to Gujarat’s co-convenor of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) and state president of the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV), Vikash Ahir.
A spokesperson for Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) recently made offensive remarks about the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), which sparked widespread protests throughout the Islamic world. Zubair had helped bring attention to these remarks.
According to an exclusive report from the Indian publication The Wire, an investigation uncovered a network of hundreds of accounts connected to Vikash that all attempted to link Zubair and Partik Sinha, the co-founder of AltNews, by misrepresenting their earlier tweets as “Hinduphobic” and tagging local authorities in an effort to imprison the pair for inciting religious sentiment.
Human rights organisations claim that Indian authorities are increasingly persecuting online critics and journalists, a claim that is refuted by the government.
