Recently, Lucknow resident Vivek Tiwari was killed by a bullet injury, fired by Uttar Pradesh Police on the intervening night of 28th and 29th September. The rightful outrage flooded social media with people demanding justice of Vivek and the wife he left behind. UP Police filed a case of murder (under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code) against the two policemen who shot Vivek Tiwari, who later succumbed to injuries.

However, there was no dearth of people playing vulture politics of the unfortunate death of Vivek Tiwari. Arvind Kejriwal, supposedly giving condolence said, “UP Police had filed a case of murder (under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code) against the two policemen who shot Vivek Tiwari, who later succumbed to injuries”.

Vivek Tiwari’s grieving wife took strong exception to Kejriwal viewing this from a religion based prism and said he shouldn’t link everything to with religion.

A similar amount of hate was displayed by one Facebook user called Danish Khan. Khan took to Facebook to assert that Vivek Tiwari’s wife deserved her husband being murdered because she had voted for Yogi Adityanath.

- Advertisement -

When one looks at Danish Khan’s profile, one realises that he has worked for several media organisations and is currently working with Arnab Goswami led Republic TV.

Danish’s profile says that he was a former graphic designer at Network 18, a former senior assistant producer at TimesNow and is currently working as a senior producer at Republic TV.

OpIndia.com reached out to Republic and were told that Danish Khan was pulled up for his comment and given a stern warning against posting such content. Following this, Khan deleted his Facebook post.

Republic TV also said that over 70% is non-editorial, just like Danish Khan and it is impossible to be held responsible for all their views. But we are told that the channel has taken this up strictly and asked the employee to refrain from posting hateful content.

This is not the first time that posts celebrating the death of people who voted for the BJP have surfaced.

A Facebook user named Deepak Sankaranarayanan was slapped with a non-bailable case by the Kerala police, for a post where he called for the murder of all Indians who voted for the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. Deepak who was believed to be an employee of HP based in Bengaluru wrote a Facebook post in Malayalam with reference to the Kathua rape case. In the post, he wrote that “Justice should prevail, even if it involves shooting to death that 31 per cent, which is seven times the casualty of World War II, that objects to justice.”

It is intriguing that while Facebook’s strict community standards deemed necessary to remove a simple post that said “Har Har Mahadev” because “it didn’t follow community standards” doesn’t take action against accounts who post such bigoted and hateful tweets celebrating the murder of a man, simply because they don’t agree with him politically.