NEW DELHI: A famous journalist who was detained last month over what police described as a “very offensive” 2018 tweet intended to sour relations between the majority Hindus and the minority Muslims was granted bail on Wednesday by India’s Supreme Court.
After an anonymous Twitter user complained about the four-year-old tweet, Mohammed Zubair, a co-founder of the fact-checking website Alt News and a prominent critic of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was detained.
The justices noted that “authority of arrests must be pursued carefully” when releasing Zubair on bail. The court further declared that there was no rationale for keeping Zubair in detention, even though investigations may go on.
Zubair’s attorney had previously claimed that the lawsuit was bordering on ludicrous because the Muslim had parodied a Hindi-language film in his 2018 tweet and there was no proof that he had offended Hindus’ religious emotions.
Zubair and his associates charged that the federal administration was silencing journalists and other dissidents by deploying the police. According to Zubair’s attorney, the government is using the 2018 case against him as retaliation for this year’s widely shared post.
