New Delhi: The Uttar Pradesh police has booked right-wing activist and scholar Madhu Kishwar and four others for allegedly “publishing a rumour with intent to incite a community,” after she posted a video of an incident that occurred in 2017 on social media.
Kishwar had posted a viral video in which a vehicle carrying kanwariyas was seen to be allegedly mowing down a Muslim person.
The video claimed that the kanwariyas have been booked for intentionally running over the Muslim person.
According to Scroll.in, the Saharanpur Police has put out a statement clarifying that the incident took place in 2017 and action had been taken in the matter. The police said that the video was misleading and false, and urged social media users to delete the posts.
However, Kishwar and the four others did not take down the post, the report said. The four other social media users have been identified as SH@KT! proud Hindu, Shudha Shukla, Raj Kamal and Anil Mansingka.
Kishwar and the others have been booked under Indian Penal Code Section 505(2) (publishing or circulating a rumour with intent to incite a class or community), and Section 66(D) of the Information Technology Act, the report added.
➡️ थाना देवबंद, सहारनपुर पुलिस द्वारा सोशल मीड़िया प्लेटफॉर्म पर असत्य एवं भ्रामक खबर फैलाने वाले 05 व्यक्तियो के विरुद्ध बड़ी कार्यवाही करते हुए गंभीर धाराओ में मुकदमा पंजीकृत किया गया है !!#UPPolice @News18UP @AmarUjalaNews pic.twitter.com/cDGokvrPRe
— Saharanpur Police (@saharanpurpol) July 24, 2022
The case was registered at the Deoband police station.
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In April, Kishwar had shared another objectionable post targeting the Muslim community, and later deleted it. She wrote that the “sexual prowess” of Muslim men allows them to entice Hindu, Christian and Sikh girls. She referred to Muslim men as “trained stud bulls” and gave the unproven “love jihad” a new name – “sex jihad”, Alt News, a fake news debunking website, reported.
As per the report, she had removed the tweet after immense backlash against it.
On July 23, she termed Pulitzer prize-winning Indian photojournalist Danish Siddiqui a ‘jihadi’. Siddiqui, who was working for Reuters, died on July 16 while covering clashes between Afghan security forces and Taliban in Kandahar.
In 2018, she had tweeted about a school bus attack incident in Gurugram, naming five random Muslims as the attackers. This post was found to be factually incorrect by Alt News. The report further enumerated a few more posts shared by Kishwar which were found to be false and misleading.
In May that year, the J&K police had called out Kishwar for sharing a misleading tweet which alleged that the J&K DGP had suspended the SP who killed Burhan Wani in 2016.
More than shocked to read concoted information being shared by a senior journalist like you @madhukishwar .No SP has been suspended.Kindly check before sharing such information. https://t.co/IJDQI691YX
— J&K Police (@JmuKmrPolice) May 28, 2018
Kishwar, who is an alumna of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, has written on gender-related matters and politics. She is also a co-founder of Manushi, a journal on women and society, and wrote the book Modi, Muslims and Media: Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat in 2014.
