Citizens for Justice and Peace wrote to Aaj Tak (India Today Group) raising concerns over their show “Black and White” hosted by Sudhir Chaudhary. On the show, Chaudhary was conducting an “analysis” of alleged illegal mazaars (Islamic shrines) in Uttarakhand.
Chaudhary, once again, came up with an inventive term with the infamously perilous ‘jihad’ suffix and called it “Mazaar Jihad”. Even though the News Broadcasting & Digital Standards Authority (NBDSA) has repeatedly reprimanded and warned news broadcasters against using such derogatory terms and indulging in such deleterious name calling, channels like Aaj Tak, especially Sudhir Chaudhary seems to be unaffected by the same.
Pointing out the same, CJP in its complaint, has underscored certain extracts from the show that are contentious.
A mazaar is a shrine which usually belongs to some religious leader or sufi saint. In the show, Chaudhary claims that there are multiple mazaars in Uttarakhand where the name of the person buried there is the same across locations. He questions how one person can have shrines in different places.
Further, he claims that the mazaars after being demolished were examined and it was found that there are no human remains in the grave, which means that these were fake shrines, intended to encroach upon government land so that people from Muslim community can start living on that encroached land. He made these wild claims without giving any source for such a claim or any solid basis.
He also encouraged people to look around them and if they see any mazaar, ask the police or local MLA to have it examined to ensure that it is not a fake mazaar. He also kept encouraging his viewers throughout the show, to tweet using the hashtag #MazaarJihad.
After he encouraged his viewers to tweet with #MazzarJihad it was found that the twitter social media platform was rife with such tweets which were denigrating towards the Muslim community. This indicates that the following that Chaudhary has is vast and so is his influence.
The complaint states, “Any journalist following the principles laid down by the NBDSA and going by journalistic ethics would have just presented the news as whereby a government report has claimed that illegal mazaars were found in Uttarakhand and presenting what has been found or alleged. However, Sudhir Chaudhary is one of the main propagators of the Anti-Muslim narrative and while he claims to be neutral by expressly stating so, his so-called neutrality is laid bare when he sues such terms like “Mazaar Jihad” and asks people to look around them for mazaars and report them to the police to verify if they are real.”
The complaint may be read here:
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