Opposition parties criticised the filing of an FIR against The Wire, a news portal, by the Uttar Pradesh police on the charge of wrongly attributing a quote to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on the Ram Navami festival controversy .
Senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram demanded that the FIR be immediately withdrawn. “UP government has filed an FIR against @thewire_in for carrying a story containing facts and only facts. No ‘fact’ is wrong or even alleged to be wrong. Where is the crime? The FIR is a deplorable act intended to suppress freedom of the media. The FIR must be withdrawn immediately,” he wrote on Twitter.
Former Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari said the FIR amounted to an assault on the freedom of the press as well as on civil liberties. “A very unfortunate manifestation of the COVID-19 crisis is the propensity towards extreme authoritarianism that is on a full naked display by the NDA government. Nothing underscores it more than the FIR against The Wire,” he said.
RJD Rajya Sabha member Manoj K. Jha said FIRs, including this one, did not come as a shock. “The government has repeatedly assaulted the voices that are not identical to it. It is using this pandemic to further shut such voices,” he said.
CPI general secretary D. Raja called it a brazen attack on the freedom of the press. “The simple question that comes to our minds is that when the whole country is in lockdown, how is the Chief Minister participating in a public function. How are the rules being relaxed for him,” he said.
