FIR Filed Against Rana Ayyub for ‘Anti-India’ Posts on Social Media

A journalist named Rana Ayyub is in legal trouble for allegedly insulting Hindu gods and trilaterally promoting anti-India propaganda, which was reported by Live Law. A court in Delhi has ordered an FIR, following a complaint against Ayyub’s posts on social media.

Chief Judicial Magistrate Himanshu Raman Singh passed the order after lawyer Amita Sachdeva complained about the activities of Rana Ayyub on the social media platform. She claimed that it was aggrieving Hindu beliefs and creating anti-India hatred. 

“In light of the facts and circumstances, the complaint portends the commission of cognizable offenses for which FIR is necessary. The current SHO Cyber Police Station is hereby ordered to change the details of the complaint into FIR and ensure that the matter is properly investigated,” the court said.

The court determined that some of Rana Ayyub's tweets contained supportive remarks for Shehla Rashid and others, as well as attempts to disparage Indian culture. It seemed to warrant a full police investigation. This constitutes the offenses under sections 153A (promoting animosity between the groups), 295A (intentionally hurting religious feelings), and 505 (public mischief) of the IPC.

"The facts pleaded by the complainant are such that they require the intervention of state machinery in the form of a police investigation,” the court noted.

At first, Sachdeva went to the Cyber Cell of Delhi Police with a complaint of IPC Section 66A of the Information Technology Act alleging that Ayyub’s tweets are planned to “regularly ridicule, insult Hindus, speak badly about India, and promote riots between religions.”

Sachdeva said that after the police failed to initiate an investigation, she went to the magistrate’s court.

Rana Ayyub's posts revealed "an agenda to insult Hindu beliefs and create communal strife," according to the complaint, which called for the state to step in.

Who is Rana Ayyub?

Rana Ayyub is one of the strongest Indian investigative journalists as well as an active global opinion contributor to the Washington Post. Ayyub has held the positions of reporter, editor, and columnist at several top Indian and international news agencies. She has written for Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Atlantic, along with several other publications. 

Rana has extensively reported majoritarian politics and violence, state extrajudicial killings, Islamophobia, and communalism and authored the international bestseller “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up," an undercover investigation of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and communal violence under his reign. 

In 15 years of her professional career, Rana Ayyub has received a Sanskriti award for integrity and excellence in journalism from the former President of India. She was the winner of the global Shinning Light Award for investigative journalism in 2017. Additionally, she was recognized in 2019 as one of the ten journalists worldwide who faced extremely dangerous circumstances, and she was chosen as the Hague's 2018 most resilient global journalist. An unprecedented approach for a single case in India was taken in 2018 when the UN assigned six special rapporteurs to the Indian government for her particular protection.

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