The Kannada daily Vartha Bharati and its editor, BM Basheer, have filed a complaint with the police about a communally provocative disinformation campaign targeted at him and his family.
Basheer lodged the complaint with the Mangaluru South Police Station on Thursday, May 15, following the viral social media campaign. The police told TNM that an FIR has been registered under Sections 353 (1)(c) and 353(2) (publishing false information through electronic means) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) against Santhosh Hegde, Nitin Shamanoor and Bettampady Chandra and the editor of Puttur News.
“I was greatly shocked when I saw certain posts on Facebook on May 15. Individuals named Santhosh Hegde, Nitin Shamanoor and Bettampady Chandra have spread a false and inflammatory rumour using my name, the name of Vartha Bharati, the newspaper I work for, and Operation Sindoor.”
The three individuals named in the complaint have shared posts claiming that the wife of Basheer’s cousin has been killed by Indian forces in the recent hostilities between India and Pakistan over the Pahalgam terror attack.
In his complaint, Basheer said that he had been working as News Editor at Vartha Bharati for the past 22 years and that he had been a journalist for three decades.
All the posts targeting him have the headline “Operation Sindoor: Kannada journalist’s cousin’s wife finish” and claim that the woman’s name is Mariam and that she was an active member of ISIS. The post is accompanied by a picture of a woman and another showing military personnel standing over debris. It is unclear whose pictures have been used in the post.
An obscure website called Puttur News has also carried the disinformation as a news story, but without naming either Vartha Bharati or Basheer.
Basheer is a well-known Kannada writer with several published anthologies of short stories and poems. He has also won several awards, including the Lankesh Prashasti instituted in the name of the famed writer and journalist P Lankesh.
Meanwhile, The Campaign Against Hate Speech also filed a complaint with Mangaluru Police Commissioner Anupam Agrawal on May 15 calling for an FIR to be registered against social media users who had shared disinformation about Vartha Bharati and Basheer.
They pointed out that the woman who was projected as Basheer’s relative was a woman named Deepthi Marla, who had changed her name to Mariam and had been arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for alleged links to ISIS.
Manavi Atri, an advocate and member of the Campaign, told TNM that Vartha Bharati was being targeted for its reportage. “They’re one of the few newspapers that are actually reporting about what’s happening in Karnataka, and they have a big reach. Locally too, they’re influential, and that’s why they’re being targeted. Calling them a mouthpiece of Pakistan, as these posts do, has no basis in fact and is a violation of the law.”
Disinformation spike
Mangaluru City police have registered dozens of cases against several social media users for posting inflammatory and false content around the lynching of a Muslim man named Ashraf in Mangaluru on April 27 and the murder of a rowdy sheeter named Suhas Shetty on May 1.
TNM went through several of these FIRs and found that many of these were registered suo motu. In one of the cases, the head constable of the Bajpe Police Station had filed a complaint against a social media user and a Hindutva leader for making false claims that he had colluded with the killers of Suhas Shetty.
Dakshina Kannada district police have also booked Belthangady MLA Harish Poonja and the president of Kuvettu Grama Panchayat in Belthangady taluk for hate speech after complaints against them.
Colonel Sofia Qureshi, too, became a victim of disinformation with posts claiming that her in-laws’ house in Belagavi was attacked by RSS extremists. Belagavi SP Bheemashankar Guled, however, issued a statement saying that no such attack had occurred.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court took suo motu cognisance of MP Minister Vijay Shah’s remarks on Sofia Qureshi and directed the state police to file an FIR against him.