Professor held for 'thoughtful' post, his other mistake is his name: Cong slams BJP

An academic’s arrest for a “thoughtful” post against violence and BJP ministers facing no action for “demeaning” the armed forces has brought to the fore the Narendra Modi government’s “double standards”, the Congress said on Sunday.

The opposition party’s scathing remarks came after the Haryana Police arrested Ashoka University’s head of the political science department Ali Khan Mahmudabad over his Operation Sindoor remarks.

“His only mistake is that he wrote this post. His other mistake is his name,” Congress’ media and publicity department head Pawan Khera said. “This is the state of New India under the Modi government”.

Mahmudabad was arrested on Sunday after two FIRs were lodged on stringent charges, including endangering sovereignty and integrity, for his social media posts related to Operation Sindoor.

One of his lawyers, Kapil Balyan, said the associate professor was produced before a court on Sunday evening and was remanded in police custody for two days in a case registered on a complaint from the Haryana State Commission for Women late Saturday night.

In a post on X, Khera said Mahmudabad has been arrested for a “thoughtful” Facebook post. “A historian and academic is jailed not for inciting violence but for advocating against it. His crime? Daring to speak truth to power, exposing the BJP’s cynical communal narrative, and calling out the hypocrisy of chest-thumping nationalism.”

“Meanwhile, the BJP minister and their deputy CM face no action after openly demeaning the armed forces. No FIRs. No arrests. That’s the double standard of Modi’s governance,” he said.
Khera was referring to the alleged objectionable comments made by Madhya Pradesh minister Vijay Shah and the state deputy chief minister Jagdish Devda.

The Congress had claimed that Devda had said the entire Indian Army and brave soldiers were bowing at the feet of Modi. On the other hand, Shah had to apologise after his remarks linking the religion of terrorists behind the Pahalham strike with that of Col Sofiya Qureshi triggered an outrage.

Referring to the BJP ministers’ comments, Khera said, “This is not about one man. It is about the slow suffocation of freedom of speech, the criminalisation of dissent, and the use of state machinery to silence intellectuals who challenge the BJP’s manufactured rage.”

He claimed the current dispensation fears questions, its own people.

When writers, professors and critics are branded enemies, the real enemy is democracy itself, he asserted and added, “We stand for an India that values debate and democracy, not dictates.”

“Mahmudabad, by the way, is the grandson of Padma Bhushan late Jagat S Mehta, who served as India’s Foreign Secretary from 1976-79, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the External Affairs Minister. His only mistake is that he wrote this post. And his other mistake is his name,” Khera said

With the post, he also shared a screenshot of the academic’s post for which he has been arrested.

The arrest comes days after the Haryana women’s rights panel sent a notice to him questioning his remarks even though Mahmudabad had maintained that they were “misunderstood” and asserted that he had exercised his fundamental right to freedom of speech.

In one of the posts, Mahmudabad said that right-wing people applauding Col Sofiya Qureshi should demand protection for victims of mob lynchings and “arbitrary” bulldozing of properties.

The associate professor described the media briefings by Col Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh as “optics”. “But optics must translate to reality on the ground, otherwise it’s just hypocrisy,” he had said.

Wing Commander Singh had briefed the media alongside Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and Col Qureshi on Operation Sindoor.

Indian armed forces hit terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in the early hours of May 7 under Operation Sindoor in retaliation against the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack.