New Delhi, 5 July 2021: The Indian Journalists Union expresses concern over an FIR lodged by Uttar Pradesh authorities in Shahjahanpur district against three journalists-- News Laundry’s Nidhi Suresh, Bhadas4Media’s Manoj Shukla and its editor Yashwant Singh. The  FIR was a tool to intimidate and harass the journalists for their work and must immediately be dropped, demanded the Union. 

The Sadar Bazar police registered an FIR against Nidhi Suresh after she reported on a woman named Ayesha Alvi who had petitioned the Delhi High Court on being “harassed” by the media after she converted to Islam. Reporter Manoj and Singh were also named in the same FIR after a complaint filed by Deep Srivastava, a News18 reporter, who claimed that Suresh wrongly accused him of extorting a woman on Twitter.

 In a statement, IJU President and former Member, Press Council of India, Geetartha Pathak and IJU Secretary General and International Federation of Journalists Vice President Sabina Inderjit  said the authorities don’t have the authority to instigate such probe without an order by a judicial magistrate following Supreme Court’s judgements from 2016 and 2020. The leadership said that UP was getting a notorious reputation of intimidating journalists to stifle their reportage, which must be seen as an attack on the freedom of press. The number of such cases was rising menacingly and the government halt in such sinister tracks.