The Bombay High Court on Monday granted four weeks transit anticipatory bail to journalist Rana Ayyub, who has been booked by the Ghaziabad police in Uttar Pradesh over the viral video of a Muslim man who was assaulted in Loni area of Ghaziabad. Rana had moved court shortly after the Ghaziabad police booked her and seven others, including Twitter, for circulating a video in which an elderly Muslim man claimed he was thrashed and asked to chant "Jai Shri Ram.” The police have said there was no communal angle in the incident and that the video was circulated to create communal unrest.
Hearing Rana’s plea, a single bench of Justice PD Naik issued an order that Rana be granted protection from arrest for a period of four weeks so that she can approach the concerned court in Uttar Pradesh to seek relief in the case. “In the event of arrest, the applicant be released on executing a PR Bond of 25,000 with one or more sureties,” the court also said, as per Live Law.
Appearing for Rana, her advocate Mihir Desai told the court that after learning the police version in the Ghaziabad case, which was conflicting with the man’s version in the video, she deleted the video that she had tweeted. The counsel also told the court that she is seeking temporary protection from arrest since she has recently undergone spinal surgery and has acute pain, and sought time to approach an appropriate court in Uttar Pradesh to seek relief. Allowing the plea, the court granted her transit anticipatory bail.
Rana was named in the FIR filed by the Ghaziabad police along with Twitter Inc, Twitter Communications India, the news website The Wire, journalist Mohammed Zubair, Congress leaders Shama Mohamed, Salman Nizami and Maskoor Usmani, and author Saba Naqvi.
The FIR has been lodged under sections 153 (wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot), 153A (promoting enmity between groups on ground of religion, class etc), 295A (deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious belief) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The Ghaziabad Police has so far arrested nine people, including key accused Parvesh Gujjar, in the case, according to officials.
In a video clip, which surfaced on social media on June 14, the elderly Muslim man, Abdul Shamad Saifi, is heard saying he was thrashed by some young men and asked to chant "Jai Shri Ram." However, the Ghaziabad police have ruled out a communal angle. It said the accused were unhappy about a "tabeez" (amulet) he sold to them. The FIR states that the Ghaziabad police had issued a clarification statement with facts of the incident but despite that, the accused did not remove the video from their Twitter handles.
Twitter has meanwhile withheld fifty tweets about the Ghaziabad incident in response to a legal demand by the Union government, Medianama reported on Monday. The tweets that have been withheld contained the video of the assault on the elderly man. While they are not accessible to users in India, they can be viewed by people outside of India.
This comes two days after the Ghaziabad Police issued a notice to Twitter India Managing Director Manish Maheshwari, asking him to join a probe in connection with the case. According to reports, Twitter has sent a reply to the police, saying they are ready to be available for questioning via video conferencing. However, the Ghaziabad police are likely to issue another notice asking Twitter officials to appear before them.
With PTI inputs