Uttar Pradesh Navnirman Sena Chairperson Amit Jani was arrested on Monday and sent to 14-day judicial custody for sending a modified image of the Taj Mahal with saffron flags on a WhatsApp group, The Times of India reported. He was arrested in Lucknow and later taken to Agra.
“My family and I are being treated as terrorists by the state government,” Jani was quoted as saying. “Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath should understand that I’m a Hindu, and a Hindu is not a terrorist.”
Jani was arrested under Section 153(B) (imputations and making assertions prejudicial to national integration) and Section 295 (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings) of the Indian Penal Code, as well as Section 66 of the Information Technology Act.
The image Jani sent showed the 17th-century monument with seven saffron flags on it.
The First Information Report said that in the WhatsApp message, Jani had appealed to “all men associated with saffron and Hindu organisations” to gather at the Taj Mahal on November 3.
The Taj Mahal has been in focus in the political discourse recently after the Uttar Pradesh government was criticised for leaving it out of the state’s official tourism booklet, and two Bharatiya Janata Party leaders commented on its origins. One of them, Vinay Katiyar, claimed that Mughal ruler Shah Jahan had destroyed a Hindu temple “Tejo Mahalaya” to build the monument, now a Unesco World Heritage Site.
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