TRUTH TELLING MUST NOT BE CRIMINALIZED
YES, and especially in these worldwide Corona
Crisis days when so many disturbing tragic phenomena are occurring, and
governments possessing excessive powers are misleading the people with
deceptive measures and untruthful propaganda, different sorts of truth speaking
by scholars and social activists is quite essential to protect and promote the
basic right to life of the people. In this context it was quite heartening to watch
Engineer Mallik exposing the many loopholes/faults in the governments’/institutions’
policies and measures in this regard, on several YouTube videos, and learning
so many new things from that. As such this editor was shocked at the news of
the Director of Public Health, Telangana, filing a criminal complaint against
the ‘false
information’
spread by Mallik, “an individual
[with] no official training in epidemiology or medical science, yet ...
continued to spread panic,” who allegedly said on
the [TV] show[s] that one person from
every household would die in the third wave, averring that “in
these testing times, spreading of rumors by P Mallik, which are unfounded and
do not have any scientific backing, will definitely cause panic and distress
among the common man. ......". It seems the Sultan Bazar P.S.
has booked a case against Mr Paruchuri Mallik under S. 54 of the Disaster
Management Act 2005 {Punishment for false
warning: (punishable with 1 year imprisonment
or fine)} and S. 505 of the IPC {Statements conducing to
public mischief:
(punishable with 3 years’ imprisonment or fine or both)}. This is nothing but severe
harassment and vilification of a whistleblower who has honestly warned the
public about the impending calamity. If this is taken as OK, then what one
should say about the WHO Director-General Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who
stated (on 26-04-2021) that the Covid-19 (second wave) situation in India was “beyond heartbreaking” and about the British
Government caused modelling report, which alerted about the third wave of COVID-19 spike that could kill/hospitalize 60-70% of the people who
took both the vaccine doses even; or of the Nobel laureate
virologist Monsieur Luc Montagnier who declared that ‘mass vaccination [for
Covid-19] is a [unacceptable] medical mistake”
and was even said to have warned about lakhs of deaths in future. We strongly feel that such criminal proceedings are but a stern suppression,
by devious means, of the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression
of the people and demand that those be withdrawn or be quashed by a competent court
forthwith. §§§
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