A timely warning: Statement against RSS attack on journalist Neha Dixit and press freedom
We, the undersigned
journalists, activists and academics, condemn in the strongest terms, the
brazen attack launched by RSS organizations and individuals on journalist Neha
Dixit and Outlook magazine for a thorough investigative report
by Dixit based on three months of field work. This report revealed how
different Sangh outfits trafficked 31 tribal girls, some as young as three
years, from tribal areas of Assam, to Punjab and Gujarat. Orders were issued to
these organizations by the Assam State Commission for the Protection of Child
Rights, the Child Welfare Committee (Kokrajhar), the State Child Protection
Society, and Childline (Delhi and Patiala), to return the children to Assam.
These orders were violated with impunity by Sangh-run institutions with the
help of the Gujarat and Punjab governments.
On the publication of this report in Outlook, a police
complaint was lodged at Latasil Police Station on grounds of inciting communal
hatred, and the police registered an FIR against Indranil Roy (Publisher),
Krishna Prasad (Editor) of Outlook and Neha Dixit, writer of
the story. The complainants are Bijon Mahajan (BJP spokesperson and Gauhati
High Court advocate), Mominul Awwal (BJP Minority Cell) and Subhash Chandra
Kayal (Assistant Solicitor General).
Instead of launching
an investigation into the trafficking, the police have chosen to act on a
frivolous and motivated complaint against those who exposed the crime. We
demand that the police immediately file charges against those who conduct child
trafficking.
In addition, RSS
organizations have started a campaign targeting Neha Dixit and Outlook in
social media, claiming “defamation”, and we can expect more trumped up police
complaints and legal interventions. We are also aware that these Hindutva
brigades often take the law into their own hands, unleashing violence with
impunity, emboldened by the current regime.
RSS organizations and
individuals have long used the law and police machinery to hound artists and
intellectuals from MF Hussain to Ashis Nandy, invoking the legal section of
“inciting communal hatred” to stifle freedom of expression, using it whenever
their own communally violent and hate-inducing tactics and actions are revealed
and made public. Journalists are particularly vulnerable, as their
investigative reports that reveal RSS organizations’ strategies to attack
minorities, Hinduise tribals and created hatred between communities, are
themselves targeted as “inciting communal hatred”.
We condemn these
familiar and reprehensible tactics of the RSS machinery and appeal to our legal
justice system to be alert to the misuse of courts and legal machinery by these
forces.
We also demand that
all criminal action against Neha Dixit and Outlook be dropped,
as this is an intolerable attack on freedom of the press to publish thoroughly
researched articles in the public interest.
source:
The full, 11,350-word
text of Neha Dixit's five-part investigation "Operation #BabyLift" on
how the Sangh Parivar flouted every Indian and international law on child right
to traffic 31 young tribal girls from Assam to Punjab and Gujarat to ‘Hinduise’
them.
see also
