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Uttarakhand: Haryana police arrest man for posting PM Modi’s morphed photo on FB
The “obscene” photo drew severe criticism from other social media users and became the subject of a complaint lodged at Tohana in Haryana’s Fatehabad district.
Haryana police have arrested an Uttarakhand resident for allegedly uploading an “obscene” morphed photograph of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his Facebook timeline last week.
Sources said Haryana police personnel nabbed the accused, identified as Md Shaqib, from Vikasnagar in Dehradun district on Saturday. The photo – uploaded a few days ago – drew severe criticism from other social media users and became the subject of a complaint lodged at Tohana in Haryana’s Fatehabad district.
“The Haryana police traced the accused to Vikasnagar and arrested him on November 18,” Dehradun superintendent of police (rural) Sarita Dobhal told HT on Tuesday.
Shaqib, hailing from Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur district, works at Aaduwala in Vikasnagar as a tailor.
This is the latest in a string of arrests of professors, cartoonists and ordinary citizens over social media posts against politicians. Rights activists say that while social media communication is not always civil, the police often use draconian laws to clamp down on free speech. In 2015, the Supreme Court scrapped a controversial clause -- Section 66 A -- of the IT Act that gave police sweeping powers to arrest anyone for posting “annoying” or “offensive” comments online.
The top court said the clause curtailed a citizen’s constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression. Posting defamatory and inflammatory content online, however, is still punishable under the Indian Penal Code.
The police team from Tohana completed the necessary formalities before arresting the accused. “They approached us in the case and even made an entry in the general diary before taking Shaqib to Haryana,” Vikasnagar police station in-charge Shishupal Singh Negi told HT.
Negi said the accused was booked under sections 67 (publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form) and 67-A (publishing or transmitting material containing a sexually explicit act, etc, in electronic form) of the Information Technology Act, and Section 292A (putting into circulation a grossly indecent or scurrilous picture) of the Indian Penal Code.
In another case, district magistrate Deepak Rawat had ordered a probe against a reader at the Haridwar district magistrate’s office in October after he allegedly shared a morphed photograph of Modi on Facebook. The accused later claimed it was his son who inadvertently posted the offending image on his wall.
