Press freedom in India at new low says Committee for the Protection of Journalists

Mohammad Zubair, co-founder Alt News

June 28, 2022*

Earlier this week, on June 27, Mohammad Zubair, co-founder of the fact-checking Indian website Alt News, was arrested in Delhi. “Authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Zubair, and allow him to pursue his journalistic work without further interference.” Steven Butler, Asia program coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in a statement. The CPJ is an independent, nonprofit organization, based in New York, that promotes press freedom worldwide.

Last month Zubair, 33-years-old, gained global attention after he tweeted about controversial remarks about Prophet Muhammad’s marriages by an official of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The remarks led “to widespread condemnation from the Islamic world and apologies from the Indian government,” The Washington Post reported. Zubair has more than 575,000 followers on Twitter. BJP supporters demanded Zubair’s arrest, including through a hashtag #ArrestZubair on Twitter.

Zubair was arrested and jailed for four days due to a criminal investigation for alleged intent to outrage religious feelings. This followed a post about him by an anonymous Twitter user, according to news reports. The post referred to a 2018 tweet by Zubair about the name change of a hotel hurting the religious feelings of Hindus. If convicted, Zubair could face up to three years in prison and a fine for each offense.

The Twitter account which complained about Zubair’s post has since been deleted. “Interestingly, it was the only tweet that was done from the said account which ultimately led to Zubair's arrest,” the Business Standard reported. The number of followers of the deleted Twitter handle went past 1,200 in a night, the report added.

Earlier this month, a criminal investigation was launched against Zubair in Uttar Pradesh state for tweeting that three right-wing Hindu activists were “hate mongers,” which CPJ documented at the time. In 2021, the police in the state also opened a criminal investigation over Zubair’s social media posts about a video depicting a group of Hindu men beating an elderly Muslim man.

Zubair, who grew up in Bangalore, worked as a software engineer with Nokia, the Finnish telecom company, for more than ten years. In 2017, while at Nokia, he co-founded Ahmedabad, India based Alt News with Pratik Sinha, who is the editor. Earlier Sinha was a software engineer for thirteen years, including at the Gujarat, India, office of Cloudleaf, a U.S. based supply chain software company. In 2003, he earned a Bachelor’s in Engineering Electronics from the Visvesvaraya Technological University, near Bangalore. Alt News science editor is Sumaiya Shaikh who holds a PhD in medicine from Sydney, Australia.

In 2018, Zubair quit Nokia and began working full-time at Alt News. The site covers fake news and misinformation in politics, law, caste-based and religious discrimination, gender rights, labour and farmer struggles, and health and medical issues. The content is produced by a volunteer team of engineers, social activists, journalists and scientists. It has 177 million followers on Facebook and more than 427,000 on Twitter.

Last month, Alt News exposed an analysis, widely shared on social media, as falsely claiming to describe extracts from a book by Mark Tully, the former BBC correspondent in India. The ‘extract’ is titled Prime Minister “Modi destroying termite ridden old Banyan tree.” It described Tully as noting that the Nehru dynasty is a “termite ridden old Banyan tree which will still try its best to stop any one growing to the extent that it may even turn the soil upside down before falling down.” The dynasty refers to India’s Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi and his grandson Rajiv Gandhi.   

Alt News found there were no such passages in Tully’s book No Full Stops in India. Further, in an email to the online publication, Tully stated that the fake passages were “a rehash of an older fake which has been in circulation for years now. I would be enormously grateful for anything you can do to make it known the so called article allegedly by me is a fake.”

Last weekend, the Indian police arrested Teesta Setalvad, a prominent human rights activist. She “led a crusade against government officials for their role in the 2002 sectarian riots, in which more than 1,000 people were killed” in the state of Gujarat, according to The New York Times.

Global civil liberties groups have criticized the rise in number of journalists being jailed and other curbs on press freedoms and civil liberties in India. As of December 1, 2021, the CPJ found that seven journalists were detained in India, setting the country’s record for the highest number of detained journalists since at least 1992. India is ranked 150 out of 180 countries in the 2022 World Press Freedom Index, based on a study by Reporters Without Borders. A non-profit based in Paris, its goal is to defend “the right of every human being to have access to free and reliable information.” It works with the United Nations, Council of Europe and other organizations.

Following Zubair’s arrest, Steven Butler of the Committee for the Protection of Journalists said in a statement that the arrest of Zubair “marks another low for press freedom in India, where the government has created a hostile and unsafe environment for members of the press reporting on sectarian issues.”

*Story updated July 1, 2022

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