The Congress said on Wednesday that it will take disciplinary action against two of its leaders, Sampath Jha and Subbarao, for their involvement in the attack on Scroll.in contributor Malini Subramaniam’s house in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region. The party issued a show-cause notice to the two accused based on the decision of Chhattisgarh Congress chief Bhupesh Baghel, party General Secretary Shailesh Nitin Trivedi said. Trivedi added that the party supported democratic values and the freedom of the press and condemned acts that compromised them.
The Chhattisgarh police filed a First Information Report two days after the attack on her house. They had earlier refused to take action, but were compelled to do so after several reports of the attack on Subramaniam's house appeared in local and national media. Human rights organisation Amnesty International called the attack another indicator of the increasingly hostile atmosphere in which journalists and human rights defenders operate in Chhattisgarh. The Editors’ Guild also expressed concern over such intimidation tactics.
On Sunday evening, a group of 20-odd men from the Samajik Ekta Manch – a newly formed group that claims to be working against the spread of Naxalism in Bastar – staged a demonstration outside Subramaniam's house. She identified two of the men – Manish Parakh and Sampat Jha – saying they had visited her house on January 10 and warned her against writing articles that tarnished the image of the police. Parakh is the secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Yuva Morcha and that Sampat Jha is a member of the Congress in Jagdalpur. In the early hours of Monday, stones were thrown at her house, shattering the rear window of her car.
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