Arrests – Journalists

June 21 was going just like any other day for 45-year-old Hussain Khan, a Palghar-based scribe, until he reached the Palghar police station at 11 pm. An hour before that, messages had begun circulating on several reporters’ WhatsApp groups that the Palghar police had made a “major breakthrough” in a case of dacoity and had nabbed a prime suspect from a local gang.

Khan, who works as a stringer with Aaj Tak, a Hindi news channel owned by the TV Today Network, was the first to have reached the police station. He followed the usual drill and began filming the police and the accused they had just arrested. But in a matter of minutes, things got out of his control. The police allegedly stopped Khan from filming inside the police station, snatched his mobile phone, thrashed him and arrested him. Khan’s friend Ram Parmar, a senior reporter with Hindustan Times who reached the police station a few minutes later, was also arrested.

Both journalists were booked under the Indian Penal Code for assaulting a public servant and deterring him from the discharge of his duty. The police claimed these two reporters had obstructed the police from carrying out their investigations and when they asked them to leave, they had allegedly assaulted the police. But other district reporters who had reached the police station soon after say that the arrest and the subsequent police conduct in hiding facts about the incident have only raised severe doubts.