India’s top court granted bail on Friday to a Muslim journalist accused of insulting Hindu religious leaders on Twitter, after his arrest last month raised concerns over media freedom.
But Mohammed Zubair, who co-founded fact-checking website Alt News and regularly tweets on the increasing marginalisation of India’s Muslim minority, will remain in police custody due to another complaint filed in the capital New Delhi. A complaint filed in June in the Sitapur district of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh alleged that Zubair had hurt religious sentiments by describing a group of Hindu religious leaders as “hate mongers”, according to a court document.
Ruling on the Sitapur complaint, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court granted Zubair five days bail, and also ordered him to refrain from tweeting and tampering with any electronic evidence. Zubair was initially arrested based on a complaint from a Twitter account that said he insulted Hindus in a 2018 post commenting on the renaming of a hotel after the Hindu monkey god Hanuman.
At least 757 anonymous Twitter accounts, linked to the state president of the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV) and co-convenor of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) in Gujarat Vikash Ahir, were the driving force behind the arrest of journalist Mohammed Zubair. Zubair had played a role in drawing attention to incendiary remarks about Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) recently made by a spokesperson for Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that sparked widespread protests across the Islamic world.
Indian publication The Wire, in an exclusive report, said an investigation uncovered a network of hundreds of accounts linked to Vikash, all of which attempted to implicate Zubair and Partik Sinha – co-founder of AltNews – by misconstruing the journalists’ old tweets as “Hinduphobic” and tagging local authorities in order to have the duo incarcerated for offending religious sentiment. Human rights group say that Indian authorities are increasingly picking on journalists and online critics, a charge that government officials deny.