Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has strongly denounced the surge of threats and hate messages that have hit the journalist over the last week, and called on the authorities to shed light on the possible complicity of certain elements of the police.
All started with a sibylline message posted on Twitter on November 8: journalist Rana Ayyub , editorialist at the Washington Post , wrote that she “hopes that [his] country will not disappoint . ” She was referring to a decision that the Supreme Court had to make the following day, about the site of Ayodhya – a city in northern India that has crystallized, for at least thirty years, the passions between Hindus and Muslims.
It did not take more for the message of Rana Ayyub to trigger a truck of insults, calls to rape or murder on his behalf, orchestrated on Twitter by trolls attached to the Hindu nationalist movement. More surprisingly, the journalist was threatened with prosecution by the Amethi City Police Department, which issued the following message within half an hour of the journalist’s initial post: “You come to make a political comment. Please delete it immediately, otherwise a lawsuit will be brought against you by @amethipolice. “
Amethi being located 100 kilometers from Ayodhya, the police of this city has no jurisdiction on this site, nor on the journalist Rana Ayyub herself, who resides in Bombay. Currently abroad , she told RSF that she would be arrested when she arrived in India because of this threat, which was not condemned by the Ministry of the Interior.
” A police that wants to sue a journalist because it would have issued a pseudo ‘political commentary’, it evokes the practices of the worst dictatorships , regrets Daniel Bastard, head of the Asia-Pacific office of RSF. One of two things: either the police Amethi is not at the origin of this message, as it defends today, which would be the sign of a serious dysfunction; or she is the author, in which case this institution is complicit in a campaign of appeals to murder. In any case, it is unworthy of a democracy. We call on the Interior Ministry to launch an internal investigation to identify those responsible for this intolerable dysfunction. “
Surf of hatred
Author of the Gujarat Files , a book-survey on the ascension to power of current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, largely re-elected last May, Rana Ayyub is one of the privileged targets of the now famous army of trolls in the service of Bharatiya Janata Party, the party in power.
In April 2018, RSF denounced an unprecedented wave of hatred against the journalist, whose phone number and address had been published. The organization later seized the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions , who sent a letter to the Indian authorities asking for protection for the journalist…
In 2019, India ranks 140th out of 180 in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index .
Copyright ©2016, Reporters Without Borders. Used with the permission of Reporters Without Borders, CS 90247 75083 Paris Cedex 02 https://rsf.org
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