Under the cover of a late September night, Uttar Pradesh police carried the body of a young, lower-caste woman into a field and cremated her over an open pyre against the pleas of her family.
The clandestine 2020 cremation prevented an autopsy that local journalists say would have revealed the brutal rape and murder of the 19-year-old woman by a group of upper-caste men in the northern state known for anti-Muslim violence. In the past, such gang rapes have incited nationwide outrage and violent protests.
But immediately after the cremation, word spread and reporters and protesters from outside the region headed en masse toward the village near the city of Hathras. To prevent riots, authorities put the victim’s family under surveillance and barred media from entering the village where they lived, according to Indian news reports at the time.
In the flood of travelers, one little-known journalist from the opposite end of the country was arrested and accused of orchestrating the massive protest effort.
Siddique Kappan, a Muslim reporter, was traveling to report on the case when he was stopped at a toll plaza near Hathras and arrested with three other men in the car, local media outlets reported.
Police said Kappan was suspected of having connections to the Popular Front of India, designated by the government as an Islamic extremist group, and was accused of traveling to Hathras to cause a “breach of peace” by Uttar Pradesh police. He was later also charged with offenses including sedition and criminal conspiracy.
More than a year and a half later, Kappan sits in a Lucknow jail awaiting a trial.
The Embassy of India in Washington did not respond to CNS’s repeated requests for comment on Kappan’s case.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Dehli told CNS that “The United States is closely following the detention of Siddique Kappan. The United States is committed to supporting democratic values, including a free and independent media and strong rule of law. U.S. officials engage regularly with the Government of India on our shared commitment to democratic values, which are the bedrock of the U.S.-India partnership.”
India’s Long Struggle with Press Freedom
Local journalists said the arrest was shocking because at the time they had not seen colleagues arrested for their work in Uttar Pradesh, governed since 2017 by a right-wing Hindu nationalist known for harsh anti-Muslim rhetoric, including encouraging his supporters to kill Muslims and burn buildings during a religious conflict in 2007.
International experts on India’s media said Kappan’s arrest was not surprising and can be considered a symptom of larger problems of declining press freedom, nationalism and growing Islamophobia abetted by the ruling party.
While India’s journalists have long worked under government-imposed limitations, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party imposed heavier restrictions after it came to national power in 2014 and began using vaguely defined terrorism laws as a legal pretext to detain journalists, particularly those reporting in areas of religious unrest.
“Indian media is facing a serious challenge from muscular nationalism of the Hindu nationalist party, BJP,” Sanjay Kapoor, the general secretary of the Editors Guild of India, told CNS in an interview via encrypted messaging service WhatsApp. “There’s a lot of nervousness reporting or commenting on issues that are hostile to the government.”
After a series of riots sparked by conflict between Hindus and Muslims, including in the city of Kaliachak in 2016, the state of Bihar in 2018 and the district of North East Delhi in 2020, the government imposed harsh sentences on people it viewed as inciting violence or affiliating with extremist groups, experts in Indian religious conflicts told CNS.
Some publications saw Kappan’s arrest as a warning from Uttar Pradesh police, advising Muslim journalists not to travel near Hathras to avoid being detained, said Indian journalists interviewed by CNS.
“It had an immediate chilling effect in that journalists thought twice about going to Hathras at that time, and since then the story has kind of gone cold. There’s very little follow-up happening about the case itself,” Siddharth Varadarajan, editor of the leading investigative outlet The Wire, told CNS.
5,000-Page Charge Sheet and Possible Government Plot
Kappan is a reporter from Kerala, a state on the southern tip of India, who contributed to various media outlets in Malayalam, the local language. He did not have the relative protection from arrest that more prominent journalists at English and Hindi publications have, analysts of Indian media told CNS.
As a Muslim, though, Kappan’s work and prior publications were scrutinized by investigators and discredited as incendiary in an unusual, nearly 5,000-page police charge sheet that a special Utter Pradesh task force filed against him and others after his arrest.
Local news outlets obtained and reviewed small portions of the charge sheet after it was filed. Over the next several months they reported that 36 articles of Kappan’s covering protests, activism and COVID-19 policies were cited by the court as evidence that he was not a “responsible” journalist.
The Indian Express, an Indian national daily publication, reported that the charge sheet accused Kappan of “taking the name of minority groups during riots” and “writing to incite Muslims” in a hidden extremist campaign to foment unrest.
Kappan’s story, however, includes a twist. Following the secret cremation, a website called “Justice for Hathras Victim” appeared and outlined plans for violent protests, The Wire revealed. Portions of the website, which were entirely in English, a language most in the region do not speak, were copied from materials for Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and referenced the New York Police Department.
Varadarajan, a founding editor of The Wire, believes that local police set up the website to make it appear that the Hathras case was manipulated by Islamic extremists in a larger conspiracy to create unrest. Kappan may have coincidentally become the fall guy for that government-directed plan, he said.
“It may not have been so much who he was, or what he did, or what he had written in the past, but simply that he became an easy person to target in order to claim that there was some kind of international conspiracy against the government,” Varadarajan said.
It would not be the only time the BJP government was caught planting evidence. Rona Wilson, also a Malayalam-speaking activist, was arrested in his New Delhi apartment in 2018 for alleged participation in a larger conspiracy to kill Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The American Bar Association investigated the evidence from Wilson’s computer and mobile phone in 2021 and found malware that planted incriminating documents on Wilson’s laptop 22 months before police seized the devices. Another digital forensic investigation by Citizen Lab Canada found Pegasus spyware on the phones of more than 20 people connected to the alleged conspiracy.
Kappan’s charge sheet says that while in police custody he admitted to creating the “Justice for Hathras Victim” website, though there was no evidence establishing a connection, Newslaundry, an Indian media watchdog, reported.
Varadarajan said he found the timeline of the website suspicious during The Wire’s investigation. The website was circulated, quickly discredited by The Wire, then Kappan was arrested a couple of days later. Varadarajan said he believes that the website’s failure to be taken seriously may have motivated the arrest in order to validate the website.
“Why would you pluck him out of the blue? I think he’s just a fall guy because when the police first came up with the website conspiracy theory, all of us blew it out of the water because they were obvious,” Varadarajan said.
Unlimited Detention Under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act
Kappan is being detained under the 1967 Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, an anti-terrorism law described by scholars and local journalists as “draconian.” Under the law, authorities can label a person as a terrorist and hold them for 180 days without producing material evidence.
With tight requirements for bail, accused individuals often spend months and even years imprisoned as they await trial. In August 2021, Al Jazeera reported a 37% increase in the number of people arrested under the law from 2018 to 2019.
The Supreme Court of India granted Kappan five days of interim bail to visit his ailing mother in February 2020, after petitions from the Kerala Union of Working Journalists. After her death in June 2020, however, he was not permitted to attend her last rites or burial.
In December 2021, the sedition case against Kappan was transferred to a specialized National Investigation Agency court in Lucknow, which has recently been designated as the official court for anti-terror law cases in Uttar Pradesh.
Kappan’s wife and son tried to visit him in early March but were barred entry by an officer due to COVID-19 protocol, said Muhammad Tahir, a colleague of a man in the car with Kappan who was also arrested, in a WhatsApp message.
Wills Mathews, a lawyer representing Kappan, said in a WhatsApp message that Kappan’s case is pending in Lucknow, but his bail applications continue to be rejected.
“Lower courts typically don’t cooperate [with bail requests],” said The Wire editor Varadarajan. “None of us expect him to come out soon. Generally with this law, people can spend years before they get to court.”