A group of journalists who were on their assignments and theatre artists, were arrested and stripped down to their undergarments by Madhya Pradesh police on Saturday in state’s Sidhi district.
The journalists were covering the developments in the arrest of a theatre artist Neeraj Kunder who was booked for allegedly making indecent remarks about BJP MLA Kedarnath Shukla and his son Guru Dutt.
“We had gone to the Kotwali police station to enquire about his arrest. But we were arrested by the police and kept in lock-up for almost 18 hours. We were beaten, abused, and were asked to remove our clothes,” local journalist and YouTuber Kanishk Tiwari told The Quint.
A theatre artist Narendra Bahadur Singh said to the news website that they were all beaten up and asked to strip.
“We had just gone to give the memorandum, but the police decided to assault us,” he said.
According to Singh, the targeted journalist Kanishk Tiwari “has exposed scams by the local police as well MLA Kedarnath Shukla, and he too faced their ire.”
Tiwari also said that he was assaulted for his “critical journalism.”
Twiari said: “I am a journalist. I have been asking tough questions about politicians, especially MLA Kedarnath Shukla and the police department here. My YouTube channel mpsandeshnews24 has over 170K subscribers. I am being targeted for my critical journalism.”
All of them were released on 3 April, a day after the detention, The Quint reported.
Mukesh Kumar Shrivastava, Superintendent of Police, Sidhi district, told the news website that there were no journalists but miscreants who were preventively detained, and later arrested.
