How The UP Police Stretch Criminal Law To File Criminal Cases Against Critics of Modi & Yogi – By Saurabh Sharma & Dharani Thangavelu
“Be ready for the third wave. Vaccinated or unvaccinated will not matter. Death is certain…” It was one of those YouTube rants that proliferated online and which Manmohan Mishra, 62, often made and posted. But the latest video that Mishra—a migrant from Uttar Pradesh (UP) to Chennai, where he ran an agency for PAN cards and other identity proof documents – posted on 7 August 2021 resulted in a suo moto case filed the next day by the police from Jaunpur in eastern UP….
On 27 August the Lucknow police arrested a former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, Amitabh Thakur, on charges of abetment to suicide…. Thakur had announced recently that he would contest elections against the chief minister…. The latest case filed was on 6 September, when a former state governor, Aziz Qureshi, was accused of sedition and three other offences for calling Adityanath’s government, in the complainant’s words, “a blood-sucking demon”….
In February 2021, Article 14 data revealed how 96% of sedition cases filed against 405 Indians for criticising politicians and governments since 2010 were registered after 2014, with 149 accused of making “critical” and/or “derogatory” remarks against Modi, 144 against Adityanath….
