Referring to the BJP ministers’ comments, Khera said, “This is not about one man. It is about the slow suffocation of freedom of speech, the criminalisation of dissent, and the use of state machinery to silence intellectuals who challenge the BJP’s manufactured rage.”He claimed the current dispensation fears questions, its own people.When writers, professors and critics are branded enemies, the real enemy is democracy itself, he asserted and added, “We stand for an India that values debate and democracy, not dictates.””Mahmudabad, by the way, is the grandson of Padma Bhushan late Jagat S Mehta, who served as India’s Foreign Secretary from 1976-79, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the External Affairs Minister. His only mistake is that he wrote this post. And his other mistake is his name,” Khera said With the post, he also shared a screenshot of the academic’s post for which he has been arrested.The arrest comes days after the Haryana women’s rights panel sent a notice to him questioning his remarks even though Mahmudabad had maintained that they were “misunderstood” and asserted that he had exercised his fundamental right to freedom of speech.In one of the posts, Mahmudabad said that right-wing people applauding Col Sofiya Qureshi should demand protection for victims of mob lynchings and “arbitrary” bulldozing of properties.The associate professor described the media briefings by Col Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh as “optics”.”But optics must translate to reality on the ground, otherwise it’s just hypocrisy,” he had said.Wing Commander Singh had briefed the media alongside Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and Col Qureshi on Operation Sindoor.Indian armed forces hit terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in the early hours of May 7 under Operation Sindoor in retaliation against the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack.
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