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How the Adityanath government created a new category of criminals in Uttar Pradesh

How the Adityanath government created a new category of criminals in Uttar Pradesh

How the Adityanath government created a new category of criminals in Uttar Pradesh
Sep 19, 2021 2 mins, 32 secs

Instead, Vashif alleged the police detained him and took him around on a long ride across the vast industrial city, the largest in Uttar Pradesh.

The next day, he was formally arrested and jailed on charges of instigating violence in Kanpur during the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in December 2019.

The police claimed they had provoked and participated in the violent protests on December 20 that had led to the death of three Muslim men.

Since early December 2019, when the Modi government had amended India’s citizenship law, introducing a religious test for Indian citizenship for the first time, the country had been in the grip of intense, nationwide protests.

While protestors had been pushed back by the police in many places, in Uttar Pradesh, the government crackdown on the protests had been brutal.

A five-part series that investigates the BJP government's claim that it has reduced crime in Uttar Pradesh.

While in prison, the police booked him in another case under the Uttar Pradesh Gangsters and Anti-Social Act.

“I never attended the protests I am accused of organising to instigate violence,” he said.

In a similar case, SR Darapuri, a 76-year-old former officer of the Indian Police Service, was arrested and jailed for nearly a month on charges of instigating violence during the citizenship protests in state capital Lucknow.

The state government soon passed a law to institutionalise this practice.

The crackdown on the Citizenship Act protests brought into sharp focus another pattern that critics of the government have long pointed to: if you are a dissenter in Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh, you risk being cast as a criminal.

Journalists have been charged for exposing dysfunctional government programs; retired bureaucrats have been booked for tweeting critically about the government; activists have been hauled up for participating in protests.

Earlier this year, 87 former civil servants signed an open letter that offered a scathing indictment of the Uttar Pradesh government.

For Muslims, the ire of the state government isn’t linked to dissent.

Soon after, the stakes were raised higher, when the Uttar Pradesh police chief instructed his officials to book those suspected of cow slaughter or trafficking under the National Security Act.

Mohammad Irfan, a lawyer who litigates in the Azamgarh district court, said he had been flooded with cases of Muslim men accused of cow slaughter in the last four-odd years.

In his story, Singh accused the police of trying to suppress the matter in lieu of money.

Singh’s report created a stir, forcing the police to rearrest the accused and charge them with cow-slaughter.

The probe concluded that the police cases against Singh seemed to be an outcome of the authorities being “aggrieved” by his stories.

According to an Indian Express investigation, between January 2018 and 2020, the Allahabad high court quashed NSA orders in more than 70% of cow slaughter-related cases, directing the police to release those detained under the law.

The latest tool used by the Adityanath government to criminalise Muslim men is the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, passed in February

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

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