Deepali Kalia –
Bombay High Court on June 21st granted 4 weeks transit anticipatory bail to journalist Rana Ayyub in the FIR registered against her by Uttar Pradesh police over her tweet on the Ghaziabad incident which involved an assault of an elderly Muslim man.
The FIR by Uttar Pradesh police was registered against her and eight others, including Twitter Inc. & Twitter Communications Pvt. Ltd. for failing to take down the tweets and allegedly allowing the video to go viral, news website The Wire, Alt news co-founder Mohammed Zubair and Congress politicians Shama Mohamed, Salman Nizami and Maskoor Usmani.
It was stated in the FIR that a video of an elderly Muslim man, Sufi Abdul Samad which showed him getting assaulted was being circulated by few people on social media. In the video, his beard was forcibly cut off and he was compelled to chant “Jai Shri Ram” and “Vande Mataram”.
The FIR alleged that the accused had circulated the video through their Twitter handles without checking its authenticity and to give a communal angle to the incident in order to incite communal hatred between the religious communities.
Uttar Pradesh police had ruled out the communal angle in the incident and stated that the old man was attacked by six men because they were upset about a tabeez (amulet) he had sold them.
A single bench of Justice PD Naik ordered that Ayubb will be granted protection for a period of four weeks so that she can approach the appropriate court in order to seek appropriate reliefs.