Sunday 28 February 2016

Calling out false narratives - The fake Hafiz Saeed tweet, the Modi Sarkar & the Delhi Police #JNU

#JNU Exposing the false narratives of the Modi Sarkar & its puppets in the Delhi Police which disregard the truth, the law and the Indian Constitution 

The fake Hafiz Saeed tweet
Both the Home Minister Rajnath Singh and the Delhi Police used a tweet from a fake/ parody account of designated terrorist Hafiz Saeed to taint the slogan shouting at Jawaharlal Nehru University on 9 February with the brush of terrorism. The intent was to chill protests and silence voices that responded to the arbitrary arrest of JNU student union president under the extreme charge of sedition. When questioned on this tweet, Police Commissioner B S Bassi first claimed that the authenticity of the tweet was irrelevant. In later interviews Bassi postured and pointedly asking journalists if 'they knew' that the handle was fake. 

This fake twitter handle @hafeezsaeedjud was merrily tweeting for months to the likes of Arvind Kejriwal, Barkha Dutt, Rana Ayub and other prominent persons. The Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s twitter handle is also included in tweets along with this fake twitter handle. As are twitter handles of Rajnath Singh, and various Congress, AAP and BJP leaders. The main function of this twitter handle appears to have been to tweet praise for perceived Modi opponents like Kejriwal, Barkha Dutt and NDTV. Such trolling tweets would be followed by BJP supporters accusing for example Barkha Dutt of having terrorist connections. Instead of India-Pakistan issues like Kashmir, this twitter handle appears to have been more preoccupied with trolling perceived opponents of Modi/ BJP/ RSS and it spent much of its time on Barkha Dutt, Rana Ayyub, Sagarika Ghose, Arvind Kejriwal, even Amir Khan. 

If you search for this fake twitter handle on twitter, the search leads to many tweets over several months pointing out that this was a parody account and not really Hafiz Saeed. India considers Hafiz Saeed as a dangerous terrorist and enemy. Are we to assume that our NSA Ajit Doval, the RAW and the IB, and our Police were unaware of this twitter handle and that it was fake? Or was Hafiz Saeed conversing with Barkha Dutt, Arvind Kejriwal, Rajnath Singh and many others including Modi’s twitter handle right under the nose of our intelligence agencies? Bassi and his team have still not explained this mystery. And we can expect that they won’t because there is no accountability for the Delhi Police. Who can compel the Delhi Police to admit that it knowingly used a fake tweet in order to silence democratic dissent against its actions against JNU.

In a 28 February interview to the Indian Express, Bassi first avoided the question on this fake tweet. He finally said 
"That content was extremely anti-national. I am not concerned whether it was fake or genuine or parody or whatever. The objective was that youth should not be swayed by that seditious tweet."
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/bassi-interview-delhi-police-patiala-court-attack-jnu-row-sedition/#sthash.ASmOrcKj.dpuf

If you search for this handle on twitter you will find many tweets from this account which could constitute hate speech, anti-national speech etc. So now that the Delhi Police is of the opinion that this twitter handle was being used to spread anti-national, seditious, and hate speech, we must ask if Bassi has directed an FIR to be registered against the person behind this Twitter handle. It has been several days since the Delhi Police claimed it had written to Twitter about this handle. Surely Twitter has replied by now. Surely the Delhi Police has some idea by now as to who was tweeting using this account. Has an FIR been registered against that person?

I would hazard a guess that if investigated, this fake twitter account will turn out to have been run from Indian soil and by someone affiliated to a BJP media/ propaganda outfit/ group.















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