In Goa, a Facebook user faces jail threat for anti-Modi 'holocaust' post

A young shipbuilding professional named Devu Chodankar could be behind bars for alleged defamatory comments against Narendra Modi  - former Gujarat chief minister and the newly-elected Prime Minister of India during the run up for Lok Sabha polls.   A trial court is said to have rejected the anticipatory bail application moved by Devu, according to a report on Firstpost.com , clearing the way for his possible arrest, even as the police want to probe if Chodankar had broader plans to “promote communal and social disharmony” in Goa.   In a post on Goa+, a forum with over 47,000 members, Chodankar had claimed that if elected to power, Modi would unleash a ‘holocaust’. He deleted his post subsequently. Later, Chodankar tried justifying his post on another popular local Facebook forum called Goa Speaks. Though apologising for his choice of words, he stood by the sum of his argument, calling it his crusade against the “tyranny of fascists”. Moreover, he also claimed that some elitist right wing elements were in the process of filing an FIR with the Goa Police’s Cyber Cell.   The former chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industries Atul Pai Kane filed an FIR against Chodankar in March this year. “The complaint is against Devu for making inflammatory statements and trying to create communal disharmony, not comments against the BJP,” he said in his online post.   In the wake of the politically charged last few months in the India social media scene, we’ve seen many reports of people apprehended for so-called objectionable posts. The one incident that really brought in the harsh realities of social media censorship occured in late 2012, when two girls from Palghar , Maharashtra were arrested for making a Facebook comment protesting the closure of shops in the wake of Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray’s death. The duo was initially booked under section 295A (hurting the religious sentiment of others) and were reportedly remanded to judicial custody.   In February last year, a man in Agra was arrested for “communal and inflammatory” posts on social networking site Facebook targeting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Union Communications Minister Kapil Sibal and Uttar Pradesh’s ruling Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav.