UP: Journalist Mohammed Zubair summoned by Lakhimpur Kheri court

Shortly after receiving an interim bail for a case lodged in Sitapur, a court in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri on Friday issued summons to the Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair to appear before them on July 11.

Mohammed Zubair was given interim bail for five days by the Supreme Court on Friday in a case by the UP police against him for labelling three Hindutva extremists “hatemongers” in a tweet. However, the journalist is still in custody as he is being held in connection with another case filed by the Delhi police.

The lawsuit in Lakhimpur Kheri was filed in September. According to the complaint, a man by the name of Ashish Kumar Katiyar, Zubair spread fake information on Twitter in an effort to sour relations between different groups.

The co-founder of Alt News has been arrested by the cops under section 153A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which deals with inciting animosity among social classes.

The Lakhimpur Kheri police requested a warrant against him from the court on Friday. Superintendent of police, Sanjeev Suman, said that Zubair had been ordered to appear in court on July 11 by the Lakhimpur Kheri court.

The journalist is being held in the Sitapur district prison where the police issued the warrant.

After the Allahabad High Court last month declined to overturn the First Information Report (FIR) filed in Sitapur that referred to the three Hindutva supremacists as hatemongers, Zubair filed a petition with the Supreme Court.

The three seers Yati Narasinghanand Saraswati, Bajrang Muni, and Anand Swaroop have all recently been charged with hate speech offences for uttering offensive remarks regarding Muslims.

Senior attorney Colin Gonsalves argued on behalf of Zubair at the Supreme Court hearing that his client did not engage in any hate speech of his own and only spoke out against it when it was expressed by ‘religious leaders’.

Zubair’s tweet, according to Additional Solicitor General SV Raju, who was representing the investigating officer, was an attempt to sow discord among religious groups. He had stated that rather than tweeting about the Hindutva extremists, the journalist should have written to the Uttar Pradesh police.

Raju also referred to the Hindutva nationalist seer Bajrang Muni as a “renowned religious leader,” which sparked outrage on social media. Muni had threatened to rape Muslim women in April.