Ashish Joshi shared a social media post by the Hindutva Party calling on its state units to ‘rip apart propaganda’ of ‘dimagi Naxals’.
Former civil servant Ashish Joshi, who was picked up during his morning walk on Wednesday by plainclothes police personnel and interrogated for hours, said on Friday that a first information report had been registered against him under sections pertaining to provocation with the intent to cause a riot for a social media post.
Sharing a video by the Bharatiya Janata Party, Joshi asked if Bharatiya Naya Sanhita Section 192, under which he was charged, would also be invoked against the Hindutva party as the content it had posted “clearly meets the threshold of provocation”. The section relates to “wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot”.
The FIR against Joshi was registered for a social media post he made on August 26, in which he had called for a “Nuremberg-style trial” of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, reported The Wire. The Nuremberg trials were held between 1945 and 1949 to hold leaders of Nazi Germany responsible for World War 2 and the Holocaust that killed six million European Jews, and around four million to six million non-Jew persons, including Poles, Sinti, Romani and disabled people.
Joshi, however, said that he had been questioned about another social media post from last month, in which he had alleged that there had been a “massive showdown” between Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Home Secretary Govind Mohan after the police action against students protesting at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar.
The post was withheld in India, with X stating that the action was taken “in response to a legal demand”.
The video by the BJP that the former bureaucrat shared on Friday contained a scene from the television series Spartacus: Blood and Sand. The subtitles in the video spoke about “protecting India from ‘dimagi Naxals’”.
This was in reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech on Independence Day, when he said that “dimagi Naxals”, or persons with “Naxal mentality”, are a threat to Indian society and called for them to be “found and isolated”. Modi had also claimed that persons with Maoist ideology had for years “established themselves in the corridors of power and influenced policy-making, including as advisers on government committees”.
The BJP video, originally posted on August 28, said that state units of the party should “rip apart the propaganda” of “dimagi Naxals”. On Friday, Joshi asked if suo moto action would be taken against the video “to maintain public trust and constitutional neutrality”. “If BNS 192 is being enforced against provocation and intent to cause unrest, look at the quoted video,” he said on social media. “If the rule of law applies equally to all, initiate the same suo motu action here.”
Joshi, a 1992-batch Indian Post and Telecommunication Accounts and Finance Service officer, retired on March 31. He was earlier posted in the Union Department of Telecommunications. In February 2019, he was suspended by the Union government after he sought action against “incendiary” posts of former Aam Aadmi Party MLA Kapil Mishra, who later joined the Bharatiya Janata Party.
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