NEW DELHI—The Uttar Pradesh police have filed an First Information Report (FIR) against award winning journalist Supriya Sharma, who is presently the Executive Editor of Scroll.in, as well as the ‘Main Chief Editor’ of the same publication. This had affected her mentally and harmed her reputation in society, the FIR quotes her as saying. In its official response to the FIR, Scroll.in said that Mala Devi’s statements were ‘accurately’ reported in the article and that the FIR was an ‘attempt to intimidate and silence independent journalism, reporting on conditions of vulnerable groups during the Covid-19 lockdown’. The Committee to Protect Journalists, another international organisation that works on press freedom, also condemned the FIR against Sharma. Before Sharma, the Uttar Pradesh police recently grabbed headlines for registering an FIR against Siddharth Varadarajan, co-founder of online news portal The Wire.

Source: Huffington Post June 19, 2020 03:45 UTC