UP Police lodges FIR against Siddharth Varadarajan for article in The Wire on farmer’s death on R-Day

The Uttar Pradesh Police on Saturday filed a first information report against The Wire’s Founding Editor Siddharth Varadarajan for tweeting an article published on the news website reporting that the farmer who was killed during a tractor rally on Republic Day had died in police firing.

The article, published on Friday, cited the family of Navreet Singh rejecting the Delhi Police’s claims that he had died after his tractor overturned. The family has alleged that the man was shot.

However, doctors have refuted this claim. The postmortem analysis, done on January 27 at 2 pm, said that the “cause of death is shock and haemorrhage as a result of ante-mortem head injury”.

A case under Indian Penal Code Sections 153-B (imputations, assertions prejudicial to national-integration) and 505(2) (statements conducing to public mischief) has been filed in the state’s Rampur district, as per a report carried by The Scroll.

On Saturday evening, the Rampur district magistrate responded to Varadarajan’s tweet. “We ardently request you to please let’s be sticking to facts and facts only,” he wrote. “We hope our request will be sincerely taken up by you.”

Police forces in various BJP-ruled states have registered cases against journalists who have reported on the farmers’ rally, in what journalist bodies describe as a concerted attack on the freedom of media.

Varadarajan said the FIR reeks of “malicious prosecution”.

“In UP, it is a crime for media to report statements of relatives of a dead person if they question a postmortem or police version of cause of death,” he said in another tweet.