Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Indian police have arrested one of the country’s most prominent Muslim public intellectuals over posts on social media related to the recent conflict with Pakistan, drawing outcry from government critics who alleged violations of freedom of speech.
Ali Khan Mahmudabad, 42, was detained by police on Sunday at his home in Delhi, according to his colleagues. He was taken to a police station in the northern state of Haryana, where he heads the department of political science at Ashoka University, a leading private institution backed by top business tycoons.
His arrest comes amid an upsurge of nationalist sentiment following India’s four-day military conflict with Pakistan this month, in which the nuclear-armed neighbours exchanged a barrage of air strikes and drone attacks.
Khan was remanded by a local court on Sunday into custody for two days of questioning. No charges have been formally filed against him.
He was arrested following two complaints to police concerning social media posts in which he called for an end to the war and criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party.
“War is brutal,” one of the posts read. “The poor suffer disproportionately and the only people who benefit are politicians and defence companies.”
It also referred to “victims of mob lynchings, arbitrary bulldozing and others who are victims of the BJP’s hate mongering”, referring to abuses that minority Muslims have alleged since Modi took power in 2014.
The complaints were filed by Renu Bhatia, chair of the Haryana Women’s Commission, and Yogesh Jatheri, a BJP youth activist, under Indian legal practice in which private citizens can lodge criminal complaints.
Narinder Singh, a Haryana deputy police commissioner, said on Sunday that Bhatia’s complaint was filed under various legal clauses pertaining to “public mischief” and “endangering sovereignty, unity and integrity”.
Jatheri’s legal complaint was filed under clauses prohibiting enmity between religious groups.
Supporters of Khan condemned his arrest, which they said pointed to selective protections of rights under Modi’s Hindu nationalist administration that reflected poorly on the world’s largest democracy.
“This is clearly some kind of witch-hunt,” said Maya Mirchandani, head of Ashoka’s department of media studies. “The statement that Ali made is really not that different from what a lot of people critiquing the government have been making.”
In a post on X last week, Khan said that he was exercising his “fundamental right to freedom of thought and speech” and dismissed Bhatia’s complaint as “censorship and harassment”.
India took pains during the conflict with Pakistan to differentiate itself from its military-ruled rival, which New Delhi alleged was behind a terrorist attack in April that killed 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir. Pakistan has denied any connection to the attack and called for an independent investigation, which India has rejected.
India’s foreign secretary Vikram Misri claimed during the conflict that it would be “a surprise to Pakistan to see citizens criticising their own government”. He added that tolerance for such speech was “the hallmark of any open and functioning democracy”.
“This is not about one man,” Pawan Khera, a spokesperson for the Indian National Congress, the country’s biggest opposition party, wrote on social media platform X. “It is about the slow suffocation of freedom of speech, the criminalisation of dissent and the use of state machinery to silence the BJP’s manufactured rage.”
Khan’s lawyer, Nizam Pasha, said his client had been illegally detained, adding that “police did not give any detailed grounds for his arrest”. A petition seeking Khan’s release has been filed with India’s Supreme Court.
Kanchan Gupta, a senior government official, said the arrest was initiated by local authorities and “the central government has nothing to do with it”. He added: “The political part of it is also with the state and not the central government.”
