On Monday, the cat was truly among the pigeons as articles about Yogi Adityanath (not Modi for a change) started pouring over the FIRs filed against Siddharth Vardarajan, The Wire’s Founding Editor.
At the time of writing, both The Wire and Siddharth Vardarajan were among India’s top 10 trends on Twitter. The genesis of the new outrage cycle appears to be a piece written in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which incidentally was accused of misreporting about the Delhi riots, by Tunku Vardarajan.
Tunku (real name: Patanjali allegedly) Vardarajan is Siddharth’s older brother and he wrote a piece titled When News Suppression Hits Home where he wrote: “Siddharth, who works in New Delhi, is founding editor of the Wire, a leading online news portal. He published a news story that showed the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, in a deservedly poor light. The Wire reported that Mr. Adityanath, a preacher-turned-politician, had attended a sizable religious gathering in Ayodhya—a town regarded as the birthplace of the Hindu deity Rama—in obvious violation of a national coronavirus lockdown. It misattributed a quote to Mr. Adityanath, but the error was promptly corrected and is clearly acknowledged at the story’s end."
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor spoke up against the supposed injustice meted out as he wrote: “I've known Siddharth Vardarajan for a long time and consider him one of the most able, most strongly principled & courageous voices in the Indian media, even when we don't agree all the time. To prosecute him is indeed to persecute freedom of expression.”
He goes on to ask Information and Broadcast Minister Prakash Javadekar to ‘intervene’.
WSJ columnist Sadanand Dhume wrote: “Anyone who cares about press freedom in India should speak up about Yogi Adityanath’s thuggish attempt to intimidate Siddharth Vardarajan for doing his job as a journalist.”
Kanchan Gupta meanwhile begged to differ and wrote: “Deliberately 'misattributing' quotes is 'Press Freedom' and 'doing your job as a journalist'. If victims of 'misattribution' by journalists take legal recourse they must be called 'thugs'. The Law is Lucifer and Media is Batman. Talk about entitlement and privilege!”
Others also pointed it out.
So, what exactly is the case?
On March 31, The Wire published a report drawing parallels between the Tablighi event and a supposed Ram Navami event in Ayodhya at the Ram Janmabhoomi site.
Similar comments were made by Vardarajan on Twitter alleging that Yogi had made the comment. UP CM Yogi Adityanath’s media advisor Mrityunjay Kumar had taken to Twitter and said that 'despite the warning, Vardarajan had neither deleted the tweet nor apologised'.
Kumar had written: “FIR has been lodged. Further action is being taken.”
In an earlier tweet, Kumar had mocked Vardarajan saying that along with ‘running the website, he’d have to seek donations to fight the case’.
On April 1, Vardarajan tweeted: “I should clarify that it was Acharya Paramhans, Hindutva stalwart and head of the official Ayodhya temple trust, who said Ram would protect devotees from coronavirus, and not Adityanath, though he allowed a public event on 25/3 in defiance of the lockdown and took part himself.”
Incidentally, Paramhans – the one to whom the quote is attributed - isn’t head of the Ayodhya temple trust either.
The Wire’s erratum on the report, one trying to draw a parallel between treatment being meted out to other religious rendezvous compared to Tablighi Jamaat read: “Note: In an earlier version of the story, the quote about Ram saving devotees from the coronavirus was wrongly attributed to Yogi Adityanath. It was in fact said by Paramhans. This clarification initially described him as head of the Ayodhya temple trust; he is in fact an Ayodhya based sadhu active in the Ram temple movement. Another sadhu named Paramhans was earlier head of the Ramjanmabhoomi Nyas.”
Incidentally not only did they get the quote wrong, attributing to Adityanath what he didn’t even say, but went as far as picking the wrong head of the Ayodhya temple trust.
Two FIRs were subsequently field against The Wire, both in Ayodhya district. While one of them was by the officer-in-charge of Faizabad Kotwali. The cases were booked under Section 188 (disobedience to order), 505 (2) (statements creating enmity or ill-will) and Section 66D of the IT Act!
The FIR was condemned by several including the Editor’s Guild of India which called it ‘an overreaction and an act of intimidation’.
The Guild said: “Any such intimidation of the media or blaming the media for mass migration of workers will be counterproductive. Such actions will be tantamount to disabling the messenger. The Guild believes for sure that the media must be responsible, free and fair. But such interference can only undermine those goals.”
Meanwhile, Nandini Sundar said on Friday that seven or eight policemen drove all the way from Ayodhya to Delhi, roughly 700 km.
In a series of tweets, Nalini Sundar accused the police of ‘gross abuse’, that the cops in uniform didn’t wear masks and said they wouldn’t hand it over to ‘women and minors’.
Nandini Sundar said that the notice states that Siddharth Varadarajan should appear in Ayodhya on April 14 at 10 am in connection with FIR registered by the police.
What happens now? We will just have to wait and watch.
