Uttar Pradesh police have served a notice on the founding editor of the news portal The Wire, Siddharth Varadarajan, asking him to appear at Ayodhya police station at 10am on Tuesday.
The notice, served on Friday under Section 41(a) of the Criminal Procedure Code, quotes an FIR registered by Faizabad police earlier this month on a complaint that Varadarajan had made an objectionable remark about chief minister Yogi Adityanath.
Two FIRs had been filed against him, one referencing a tweet and another a “blog” (which was in effect an article).
In the case of the article, Varadarajan had clarified a day later that he had wrongly attributed a comment made by Acharya Paramhans, a little-known sadhu in Ayodhya, to the chief minister. He tweeted this correction, which was also carried out in the article.
Varadarajan has not commented on the notice served on him but his wife, sociologist Nandini Sundar, who posted a series of tweets on Friday night, narrating the manner in which the notice was served.
“When it comes to the gross abuse of police power by the Adityanath administration in UP and its intolerance of press freedom, it is clear that COVID-19, the lockdown and social distancing make no difference whatsoever,” she tweeted.
According to her, a man in plainclothes first came to their residence early in the afternoon to serve the notice on Varadarajan. When he was asked to leave it in the mail box, he refused, only to return an hour later with several policemen, some of whom did not wear masks, although the Delhi government has made it mandatory for everyone stepping out of home.
As media organisations rallied around Varadarajan, questioning the state government’s priorities in the time of the pandemic and seeing the move as a bid to silence criticism, Awanish Awasthi, additional chief secretary (home), said the police have been registering cases against “fake news makers on social media every day”.
“Further legal actions have been initiated against whosoever was found doing so,” Awasthi told a routine media briefing on the coronavirus.
When the FIR was registered on April 1, the Editors Guild of India had described it as “an over-reaction and an act of intimidation”.
