New Delhi: The Patiala House court has sent freelance journalist Rajeev Sharma, who was arrested by the special cell of the Delhi police under the Official Secrets Act on September 14, to police custody for six days.
Delhi police special cell said Sharma, a resident of Pitampura in New Delhi, was “found to be in possession of some defence-related classified documents”.
He was produced before the court on September 15.
The police said his bail application is listed for September 22.
The Indian Express reports that ‘Sharma runs a YouTube channel called ‘Rajeev Kishkindha’, which has 11,900 subscribers. On the day of his arrest, he uploaded two videos. One of them is an eight-minute video titled ‘China may still do mischief #IndiaChinaFaceOff’, in which he says, “Despite an agreement’ reached between the foreign ministers of India and China, the road to peace is still heavily mined. There is still no guarantee that everything will play out as per the script reached between the two foreign ministers in Moscow’.’
‘The other video is of four minutes, in Hindi, on the state of the media, which he tweeted with the caption, “The state of Indian media today is pathetic. It was supposed to be a watchdog. Instead it has become a lapdog of the government’.’
‘On September 7, Sharma wrote a piece for Global Times, titled ‘A rapprochement road map for Beijing and New Delhi benefits both countries’, in which he said, “The steady deterioration of bilateral relations since the night of May 5, when the latest standoff began, has practically evaporated all the diplomatic gains of the past years in one stroke. The current crisis is the biggest threat to normal ties between the two sides since 1962. It’s a lose-lose situation for both. Their common objective must be to build a better and peaceful future for their peoples and not a military buildup against one another’,’ the Indian Express reports, here.
