Over the past 10 days, India’s foremost fact-checker and journalist Mohammed Zubair has been shuffled between courts and prisons.
He was taken by police to various courtrooms in Delhi, and later, when new charges were brought against him, he was taken into a remote village near the India-Nepal border to conduct investigations.
On 27 June, he was arrested by Delhi police for a tweet he sent in 2018 that "insulted Hindu religious beliefs". Later, they brought up other charges against him, including criminal conspiracy, destroying evidence, and receiving foreign money.
His custody was taken over by police from Uttar Pradesh, the northern state. He was accused of using the offensive term "hatemongers" to describe three Hindu religious leaders, who were captured in videos inciting violence against Muslims and threatening to rape Muslim women. After hearing that he was under threat of death, the Supreme Court granted him temporary bail for five days.
However, the 39-year old will be held in custody until he is granted bail in the original case in which he was arrested by Delhi police.
Alt News was founded in 2017 by Mr Zubair and Pratik Sinha, a former software engineer, to combat fake news.
The website has been a major player in disinformation campaigns about religion, caste and unscientific myths over the past five-years.
Alt News, which has over 3,000 articles and been viewed more than 60 million times, has been at the center of government attention since its inception in 2017. This is mainly because it focuses on fake videos or messages that target India’s minor Muslim community.
Expert in digital forensics, Zubair is well-known for his research on the origins of unknown images or videos. These images and videos are often misrepresented by mainstream media.
It is a tedious job that requires hours of sifting through photos and videos of hatred, violence, falsehood, and propaganda.
He also oversees "UnHate", an Alt News project that documents hate speech.
People who know Zubair describe him as "a very dedicated and determined man". He is also a prolific tweeter with over half a million followers. Accounts claiming to represent Hindu nationalists are routinely trolling and abusing Zubair.
He posted e-mails on Twitter days before his arrest stating that some of his tweets critiquing Islamophobic comments made by Hindu leaders were being "withheld". This means that they cannot be seen in India, and he had requested this from law enforcement authorities.
Zubair, a Muslim, claimed that he was arrested for his work and that he was being held in custody.
Colin Gonsalves from the Supreme Court represented Mr Zubair at the top court. He told the BBC that there was not a case against him and that he "is a thorn on the side of the government because that he's single-handedly taking down hate crimes."
Police claim they are also investigating foreign remittances to his bank account, an allegation that he denies.
Journalists, activists, and leaders of opposition have criticised Zubair's arrest. They said he was being targeted for repeatedly calling out religious bigots, hatemongers, and other hateful behavior.
Critics pointed out that his arrest was due to a widely shared tweet in which Ms Sharma made comments about his arrest during a May-end television debate.
Her comments incensed Indian Muslims. They put the Bharatiya Janata Party government (BJP) in a difficult diplomatic spot. Several Muslim countries have lodged strong protests against India.
As Ms. Sharma was being called for her arrest, the BJP dropped Sharma as their spokesperson. She went into hiding, and police stated that they had increased her security.
Soon, however, Ms Sharma's supporters on social media began to call for Mr Zubair’s arrest. She had accused him of "inciting hatred towards" her and that had led to her receiving "rape threats" on Twitter.
Hashtags like #arrestzubair started trending, and just a month later Delhi police called him to question about a photo he posted of a man suspected of molestation.
The police stated that the photo showed a child next to the man and suggested it could be considered child sexual harassment. However, the photograph of the child was blurred to comply with law.
He was then detained by police for a tweet he had written four years ago. It commented on a photograph of a signboard at a hotel, which was changed from Honeymoon Hotel to Hanuman Hotel.
An anonymous Twitter account, Hanuman Bhakt (meaning worshipper of Hanuman the monkey god), made the complaint against Zubair. It was a direct insult to Hindus and called Zubair's tweet "direct insult".
At the time of the police investigation, the anonymous account had only one follower. It was deleted after the police complaint but it has been reactivated and now has more than 1,600 followers.
After it was revealed that the photo was actually a screengrab taken from an 1983 Bollywood comedy by Hrishikesh Mokherjee, many people questioned the motive for the arrest.
The Hindu newspaper published an editorial entitled Theatre of the Absurd. It stated that Mr Zubair was being paid for drawing attention to Ms Sharma’s vile remarks. The Hindu newspaper described the incident as an example of the government’s "characteristic intolerance towards fact-checkers who often expose its claims"
International rights groups as well as the United Nations expressed concern about the arrest. A spokesperson for Antonio Guterres, UN chief, recently stated that "journalists shouldn't be jailed because of what they tweet, write, or say".
On Thursday, Germany also addressed the issue. A spokesperson for Germany's foreign ministry stated that "journalists shouldn't be persecuted or imprisoned because of what they write and say." India replied that the case is being handled in courts and that such "uninformed remarks" are not helpful and should be avoided.
Critics claim that Mr Zubair's arrest is just the latest in a long line of arrests of India’s most prominent intellectuals, journalists, and activists. They also point out India's declining ranking in the World Press Freedom Index. Recent reports stated that "pressure has grown on the media to follow the Hindu nationalist government’s line" and that journalists who don't are jailed and arrested.
"Mr Zubair deserves a medal for his services to the nation," says Mr Gonsalves. He's been imprisoned instead," Mr Gonsalves says. His determinations show that one person can cause such consternation to hatemongers. Imagine if there were ten of them. "The hatemongers would then have nowhere to run."
