Ex-bureaucrat says he was booked over X post for ‘provocation’, asks if BJP will face same action

Former civil servant Ashish Joshi, who was picked up during his morning walk on Wednesday by plainclothes police personnel and interrogated for hours, said on Friday that a first information report had been registered against him under sections pertaining to provocation with the intent to cause a riot for a social media post.

Sharing a video by the Bharatiya Janata Party, Joshi asked if Bharatiya Naya Sanhita Section 192, under which he was charged, would also be invoked against the Hindutva party as the content it had posted “clearly meets the threshold of provocation”.

The section relates to “wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot”.

The FIR against Joshi was registered for a social media post he made on August 26, in which he had called for a “Nuremberg-style trial” of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, reported The Wire.

The Nuremberg trials were held between 1945 and 1949 to hold leaders of Nazi Germany responsible for World War 2 and the Holocaust that killed six million European Jews, and around four million to six million non-Jew persons, including Poles, Sinti, Romani and disabled people.

Joshi, however, said that he had been questioned about another social media post from last month, in which he had alleged that there had been a “massive showdown” between Union Home Minister Amit Shah...

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