On 12 July (Friday), Anjuman Committee of Pithoriya in Ranchi filed a police complaint against 19-year-old girl Richa Bharti for her supposedly incendiary Facebook posts, which the complainants argued hurt their religious sentiments.



The Jharkhand Police arrested the teenager on the same day.

She remained in the lock up until Monday evening.

The magistrate at the local court who ordered her bail put the condition of distributing five copies of Quran to local libraries which was recanted later.

The speed with which the police acted surprised everyone. “I think I was arrested within an hour or so of their complaint. In my case, everything happened really fast. I felt as if I had murdered someone. I was in jail for three days — from Friday evening to Monday evening,” Bharati told Swarajya in an interview.



What outraged her more was the discriminatory manner in which the administration acted. She said that “a lot of comments have been made against my religion too” and gave examples of Muslim youths posting offensive comments against whom hardly any action is taken.

She is right. In Ranchi itself, social activists have filed many cases against Muslim youths in the past few months for posting hurtful content against Hindus and their deities. But Jharkhand Police’s inaction on these cases has riled the locals especially in the light of how swiftly they acted in the case of Richa Bharti.

On 28 June, social activist Amrit Raman filed a complaint with Ranchi’s Kotwali thana against one Mojahid Pathan for using abusive and vulgar speech against Hindu deity Shri Ram.



Raman told the police that despite repeated warnings to Pathan not to post such comments, he didn’t budge and rather became more aggressive.



A case was registered under section 295(a) and 153(a) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), and an investigating officer assigned on the same day (Case number 174/2019) but Raman says that no action has been taken till date.