When efforts are under way in several parts of the country, including Bengal, to avert an escalation of the unrest over the insult to Prophet Mohammed, a BJP legislator from Uttar Pradesh has tweeted a video on Saturday with a message saying “Balvaiyon ko return gift (A return gift for the rioters)”.
The video clip uploaded by Shalabh Mani Tripathi shows two men in police uniform caning nine young men inside a room as they scream and beg for mercy. Some of the youths are in kurta-pyjamas and the rest are wearing trousers or jeans with shirts or T-shirts.
Tripathi, a former TV journalist and now first-time MLA from Deoria, did not answer calls from this newspaper or reply to a text message seeking details about the video.
Claims soon surfaced linking the video to a police station in western Uttar Pradesh. However, when this newspaper made a call, a person who identified himself as a senior sub-inspector said: “Nothing like this happened.”
Later, the officer in charge of the police station said: “The video doesn’t belong to my police station. We are taking help of cyber police.”
Uttar Pradesh witnessed large-scale protests on Friday against the remarks by now-suspended BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma, with many government vehicles torched.
Whether or not the clip is genuine, uploading the video with such an incendiary message amounts to shovelling fuel into fire. The video and Tripathi’s message could still be seen on Saturday evening. A warning that “the following media includes potentially sensitive content” accompanied the tweet right from the time it was posted.
After Tripathi’s 1.29pm tweet, Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan posted the video on Twitter with a question: “Will these criminals in uniform be held liable for this brutality?”
Following this, Tripathi posted several tweets in Hindi. One of them said: “It was necessary to remind them of the Constitution, especially those cowards who make a mockery of the Constitution by distributing a fatwa to chop off a woman’s head.”
