How the juvenile convict turned into a jihadi in the world of Swamy and Kishwar

How the juvenile convict turned into a jihadi in the world of Swamy and Kishwar

WrittenBy:Sourodipto Sanyal
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This Sunday on December 20, 2015, News X was covering (like most other news channels) the release of the juvenile convicted in the brutal gangrape and murder of Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in December, 2012.

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Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy was on the panel and he claimed that the juvenile, according to an Intelligence Bureau (IB) report, “had become a jihadi”.

This came as a shock to me. I had never heard of this before. Also, was it possible for radical jihadi elements to infiltrate into the walls of a heavily-guarded juvenile home located in North Delhi? Or are radical jihadi elements kept in the same place where juvenile criminals are to be reformed?

I did some digging and found reports in The Hindustan Times and The Times of India that came out this year in December and October, respectively, and stated that there was an IB report that raised concerns about the juvenile being lodged with another juvenile who was involved in the Delhi High Court blasts.

The Times of India report notes that the juvenile involved in the terror case had been attempting to “draw the other one into jihadi fold”. The Hindustan Times also reported that the IB had “raised suspicions of the boy being radicalised after he was shifted with a juvenile apprehended for the Delhi high court blasts”. The report adds that the juvenile involved in the December 16 gangrape case “had turned religious, grew a beard and offered namaz five times a day”.

So, from both reports, it seems there were apprehensions the IB had about the two juveniles residing in the same dorm.

But Swamy took it to another level asserting that the juvenile convicted in the December 16 gangrape case had indeed turned “jihadi”.

Swamy was not the only one. Madhu Kishwar too tweeted on December 18 that according to the IB report, the juvenile convict had been converted to “militant Islam” by “Kashmiri terrorists”. Kishwar names the convict.

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Note that the Juvenile Justice Act of 2000 says, “No report in any newspaper, magazine, news-sheet or visual media of any inquiry regarding a juvenile in conflict with law or a child in need of care and protection under this Act shall disclose the name, address or school or any other particulars calculated to lead to the identification of the juvenile or child shall nor shall any picture of any such juvenile or child shall be published.” Doing so is punishable with a fine of maximum Rs 1,000.

Given Kishwar makes the claim that “Kashmiri terrorists” have radicalised the juvenile, I decided to call her and ask her where she had got her information from.

She told me that she had read it in two or three newspapers. When asked which ones, she couldn’t recall the names of the newspapers that she had got it from. I did some digging again and found that no report mentioned “Kashmiri terrorists” radicalising the juvenile. Clearly, Kishwar had imagined the report or completely misread the TOI and HT reports.

I also couldn’t find any report mentioning that the juvenile had embraced militant Islam. There is mention of fears of him being drawn into radicalism. But how does one define the concept of radicalisation? Can any conservative be labelled as a radical? An individual may keep a beard or offer prayers or follow the “fundamentals” of a religion, but does that automatically make him a threat to the society or a militant, as Madhu Kishwar notes. He may just be a conservative with fundamental views, which liberals may not be comfortable with, but does that make him necessarily a militant. Militant has obvious connotations to using violence and weapons in this context. Kishwar’s tweet has been retweeted more than a thousand times and favourited by more than 400 people on Twitter.

It is instructive to go through the response that this tweet has generated. One of them said: “Says much about Kashmiri and Islamic terrorists. To them this monster to be rewarded with more virgins in heaven.” It is no more about the juvenile and gangrape now. But about Kashmiri and Islamic terrorists. The juvenile convict is now a threat not because he had committed a heinous crime of rape, but because of him wishing to have 72 virgins after wreaking havoc on the lives of innocents.

Now, given whatever little we know about the IB report from the TOI and HT articles, it may not be completely incorrect to fear that the juvenile was being lured into radicalism. But why extrapolate that into implying that he has turned a jihadi?

Both Swamy and Kishwar are noted public people who have tremendous following on Twitter. Is it too much to ask of them to be accurate, if not measured, in the messages they send out, especially on public platforms? What gains did the two make by adding a needless element of imagined militant radicalisation in an already heated debate on juvenile conviction?

A report in January by The Hindu, states Twitter has around 22 million Indian users, the second after Japan in the Asia Pacific region. In all likelihood, the numbers are increasing fast. Credibility is a currency one can earn over time and squander much faster, as Big Media has done in the past few years. That applies to social media too. If indeed it is the social media guerillas who want to replace Big Media as information sources, this is not the way to do it. Especially if you are a journalist or political leader.

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