Richa Bharti is a 19-year-old student. On Friday she was arrested after a police complaint was filed against her, for a Facebook post allegedly hurting religious sentiments. On Monday a Ranchi court granted her bail, with one of the conditions for this being that she would distribute five copies of the Quran to five institutions in the city. But yesterday, in a welcome retreat, the court has done away with this condition, accepting “difficulties in its implementation”.
Welcoming this order should not be confused as an endorsement of Bharti’s social media post, which steps into a communally charged conversation centred on last month’s lynching of 24-year-old Shams Tabrez Ansari. It should be remembered that Ansari died four days after police inexplicably booked him, instead of taking cognizance of the attack on him. He should never have been detained. But copious arrests of citizens over social media posts are also the wrong path – because it is often arbitrary, biased and violative of freedom of expression.
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As for the court initially having directed Bharti to distribute copies of the Quran, obviously, it is akin to opening a can of worms. It sets an extremely undesirable precedent. In May when the apex court had made BJYM leader Priyanka Sharma’s freedom conditional on an apology for morphing Mamata Banerjee’s face on a photo of Priyanka Chopra Jonas, that too was akin to laying the ground for wanton criminalization of free speech. Such precedents are best avoided.