New Delhi: The police in Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr district have lodged an FIR against two senior officials of Twitter India – including managing director Manish Maheshwari – over an incorrect map of India published on the platform.
The FIR was lodged at the Khurja Nagar police station on Monday evening on the basis of a complaint by an office-bearer of right-wing Bajrang Dal. The map, which showed the union territories of Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir as outside India, was noticed on Monday.
Twitter had removed that map on Monday evening.
“The world map does not show Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir as parts of India. This is not a coincidence. This act has hurt the sentiments of Indians, including me,” Bajrang Dal’s western UP convenor Praveen Bhati said in his complaint.
The FIR names Twitter India MD Maheshwari and news partnerships head Amrita Tripathi as accused who have been booked under Indian Penal Code Section 505 (2) (public mischief). Charges under the Information Technology Act section 74 (publication for fraudulent purpose) have also been invoked in the case.
Hours after the FIR, Tripathi tweeted that she did not have the kind of powers at Twitter that people seemed to think she did.
This is the second FIR filed against Maheshwari by the UP police in the last month. Earlier, he was booked in a case about videos of an elderly Muslim assault victim in Ghaziabad. The Karnataka high court granted him interim protection from arrest in that case. The UP police on Tuesday challenged this interim relief in the Supreme Court, NDTV reported.
Twitter and the Union government have been at loggerheads over the last few months over several issues – including the platform marking the tweets of several BJP leaders as ‘manipulated media’. More recently, the Union government claims that Twitter has failed to comply with the new IT rules because it has not appointed a full-time grievance officer who lives in India. Because of this, government sources told the Indian Express, the platform no longer qualifies as an ‘intermediary’ or receives ‘safe harbour’ protections.
(With PTI inputs)