‘Staged like a script’: New FIR against journalist Abhishek Upadhyay

Independent journalist Abhishek Upadhyay, who runs the YouTube channel Top Secret and has repeatedly highlighted the Ram Mandir donation scam, has been booked in a case registered at the Indirapuram police station in Ghaziabad.

In a series of posts on X, he alleged he is being targeted for his reporting, and that the police refused to give him a full copy of the FIR against him. Upadhyay said several police personnel arrived at his home late on Thursday night while he was away. 

The journalist said the Ghaziabad case reportedly relates to alleged road rage and verbal abuse arising from an incident outside Shipra Mall earlier this week. “On the 18th, a man on a motorcycle grazed my car near Shipra Mall,” he wrote. “He subsequently called the emergency service (112), and today, an FIR has been lodged.” He challenged the police to make the footage public: “They would be left too embarrassed to show their faces.” The incident, he wrote, was “staged” and resembled “a well-crafted Bollywood script”.

The contents of the Ghaziabad FIR could not be independently verified. 

Reached for comment, Indirapuram ACP Suryabali Maurya said Upadhyay would have been given a copy of the FIR had he come to the police station “just behind his house” when the police team had gone to summon him. Now, he can get it “through the judiciary” as “per procedure”. Asked whether any notice was given to the journalist to join an investigation, Maurya said the police team had gone precisely to summon Upadhyay. He added the police have seized Upadhyay’s car since it was allegedly involved in the accident.

Calls to Upadhyay returned a busy signal. However, the journalist described the sequence of events in a series of tweets. 

At 2:45 am, he said, the local outpost in-charge sent him a single page over WhatsApp – “a page that contains details of neither the legal sections invoked nor the incident itself”. When he pressed for the complete document, he said, he was instead sent a page from a 2025 FIR registered in Lucknow: “one registered against me for reporting the heinous murder of a NEET student in Yogi Adityanath’s Gorakhpur”. 

Screenshots he posted of a WhatsApp exchange with a Ghaziabad police officer show him asking why he had been sent an old FIR. The officer replies, “It was done automatically.” Upadhyay writes back: “You came to my home at night with a dozen policemen and you don’t even have a complete FIR?”

The contents of the 2025 Lucknow FIR could not be independently verified. 

Upadhyay linked the latest case directly to the BJP government. “Yogi Adityanath, deeply rattled by the exposure of his government’s rampant corruption – and having failed to achieve anything despite filing numerous FIRs –  this is the only tool left,” he wrote. 

In another post, he questioned whether the incomplete paperwork was deliberate: “Is it to ensure I remain unaware of the legal sections under which your police force is searching for me?” He added that their “sole aim is simply to whisk me away in the dead of night”.

He also pointed to an earlier FIR against him by the Uttar Pradesh police “in which Yogi Adityanath is described as ‘God’ and I am labeled an ‘agent of foreign powers’.” Newslaundry had earlier reported on previous FIRs against Upadhyay (here and here).

Several journalists voiced support for Upadhyay online.

Congress media in-charge and Rajya Sabha MP Pawan Khera said the journalist was “being hounded and silenced by the Yogi government through an FIR”. Khera said: “The Yogi-Modi duo failed to manage the trust properly, failed to ensure accountability, and failed to protect the faith and donations of millions of devotees. Now, when someone else is doing the job they failed to do, they are using the machinery of the state to intimidate him and erect every possible obstacle in his path.”

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