Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News, has been honoured with the 2024 Kottai Ameer Communal Harmony Award by the Tamil Nadu government, reported The Wire. He has been awarded for ‘services rendered by him in maintenance of communal harmony’.
The award carries a cash prize of Rs 25,000, a medal, and a certificate. It is presented on Republic Day every year by the chief minister of Tamil Nadu to a native of the state for their outstanding services toward promoting communal harmony. Zubair is from the Krishnagiri district in Tamil Nadu.
The citation for the award also notes the contribution of the website Alt News, which Zubair co-founded with Pratik Sinha, in ascertaining the “veracity of the news coming out on social media”.
Zubair said he was overwhelmed to received the award and was very happy that Alt News’ work was recognised.
The state government noted that in March 2023, amid an onslaught of fake news that migrant workers from other parts of India were being assaulted in Tamil Nadu, the work done by AltNews was instrumental in disproving that the videos being circulated as part of the disinformation campaign were not, in fact, from Tamil Nadu.
In doing so, the news website “acted to prevent violence caused by caste, religion. race and language in Tamil Nadu”.
As a result, the police lodged cases against the Hindi newspaper Dainik Bhaskar, the right wing propaganda website OpIndia, a spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party and various social media users for promoting the false claim of migrant workers getting attacked in Tamil Nadu, reported The News Minute.
On June 27, 2022, soon after Zubair had drawn attention to allegedly derogatory comments made by BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma against Prophet Muhammad, he was arrested by the Delhi Police. This was on the basis of a complaint about a post of Zubair’s on X (formerly Twitter), from 2018, that was allegedly offensive to Hindus. He spent 27 days in jail.
Zubair is facing six cases in Uttar Pradesh and one case in Delhi in connection with allegations of promoting enmity between groups and hurting religious sentiments.
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