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New Delhi: The self-regulatory News Broadcasters and Digital Standards Authority (NBDSA) recently ordered Zee News to take down videos of programmes it aired about purported ‘mehndi jihad’ on the grounds that they violated media guidelines on neutrality.

In a separate order former Supreme Court Justice A.K. Sikri, the NBDSA’s chairperson, also asked Times Now Navbharat to remove tickers from two of its broadcasts on ‘love jihad’ that the complainant in the case noted were communal and vilified Muslims.

Indrajeet Ghorpade, the complainant in both cases, said that Zee in programs aired in October last year amplified a western Uttar Pradesh-based Hindutva group’s campaign seeking to discourage Hindu women from having mehndi applied by Muslims during the Karwa Chauth festival.

The group had claimed that Muslims spit and mix ‘non-vegetarian’ items into the mehndi they apply on Hindu women. Muslim henna artists also pretend to be Hindu as part of a conspiracy to marry Hindu women and also plan to forcibly convert them to Islam, it alleged.

This group also sought to police mehndi artists by checking their Aadhaar cards and performed pujas on lathis saying it would beat up artists who did not conform to its demands if the authorities did not act, Ghorpade recalled.

When Zee covered the group’s demands it “amplified them with a certain approving tone, [offered] no counter-narratives, expert voices or legal perspectives”, Justice Sikri cited Ghorpade as saying during an NBDSA hearing.

In Zee’s broadcasts, Ghorpade contended, “Muslim men were presumed guilty of deceitful intent”, while the channel reproduced slogans such as ‘dande maro salon ko’ (‘beat the bastards with sticks’) and........

© The Wire