Two days after a man in Jabalpur cancelled an order on food aggregator Zomato for being assigned a non-Hindu delivery executive, the local police on Thursday decided to make him sign a bond stating he would not post incendiary messages on social media that were against secularism and could disturb harmony.
“Amit Shukla’s tweets were against the Constitutional values of secularism and equality,” said Amit Singh, Jabalpur Superintendent of Police.
“His tweets ended up dividing Twitter users on religious lines and could stoke communal disharmony. Therefore, we are taking preventive measures under sections 107/116 of the Cr.PC and taking him to the SDM court where he will be asked to sign a bond and a notice would be served on him.”
The police had warned him that if he made such statements again, he would be charged under Section 122 of the Cr.PC and sent to jail for the remaining bond period.
Meanwhile, as soon as Uber Eats came out in support of Zomato on Wednesday evening tweeting: “Zomato, we stand by you,” several users posted screenshots of deleting both the mobile phone applications.
While #ZomatoUninstalled was the second most trending hashtag with 12,000 tweets, #BoycottUberEats was the fourth most used hashtag with 21,000 tweets among the country’s users, at the time of going to print.
Moreover, as the handle of Mr. Shukla - @NaMo_SARKAAR appears to have been removed from Twitter, his tweets are no more available on the site. It is unclear whether the account was deleted by him or Twitter.
In response to his complaint on Tuesday, Zomato’s Twitter handle had responded: “Food doesn’t have a religion. It is a religion.”
