Uttarakhand: Shaqib, a 19 year old, was arrested for posting PM Modi’s morphed photograph on WhatsApp. The arrest came as a shock to the parents who live in Shahpur-Kalyanpur village in Uttarakhand. The Police arrested Shaqib when Mukesh Kumar, a ‘BJP worker’ in Tohana, in Haryana’s Fatehabad district, complained about the photograph. The Police was quick to arrest and keep him in remand for 14 day Judicial custody.
The House of Shaqib is now frequently visited by the villagers and relatives to console them. The village of Shaqib mostly consists of daily wage labourers who earn Rs 200-300 per day. For them a phone with touch screen is a luxury good. Shaqib was able to get Touch phone after he had gone without food for six days. His father then borrowed money and bought him a touch phone for Rs 7000. His father Salim earns Rs 6,000-8,000 a month working as a daily-wage labourer. Saqib is a 3rd class drop-out.
His father Salim speaking on the phone from Hisar, where he had gone to meet his son says that “Hamne loan lekar uske liye phone khareeda. Wo bachha hai. usko kya pata phone par kya nahi karna hai .
In the family’s two-room house, its walls unplastered, Shaqib’s 80-year-old grandmother, Jamila is teary-eyed as she addresses the crowd of “well-wishers” with folded hands, pleading with them to “save” her grandson. She says she gave all the money she had – Rs 3,000 saved from washing dishes at homes in the village – to Salim, before he left the village to meet Shaqib in the Hisar jail.
Shaqib’s neighbor Hasan says that “Shaqib only got a phone four-five months ago, but he’s not educated enough to use it. He wouldn’t know how to morph images and then circulate it to people. He probably received the image on his phone and simply forwarded it. Even I receive objectionable material on WhatsApp, but I don’t send anyone to jail for it.”
The Station House Officer of Chilkana police station, Neeraj Singh says that Shaqib has “no previous criminal record” but Salim fears his son will have to live with “the tag of being a criminal”.