New Delhi: Condemning the witch-hunt of Journalists, Twitter users on Monday started a campaign on the micro-blogging site demanding the release of Journalist Prashant Kanojia.

The campaign that started at 4 pm on Monday, soon caught the pace and #ReleasePrashantKanojia was one of the top three trending topics on Twitter India at the time of posting this report, with over 20,000 tweets in less than two hours.

Journalist Prashant Kanojia was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh Police on August 18 from his residence in Delhi in connection with a tweet that he posted from his Twitter account.

“There were five-six people. Only one of them was in uniform. The rest were in civil clothes. At first, they gave us no reason as to why he was being arrested, except to say that orders had come from above.” Prashant’s wife Jagisha Arora had said after his arrest.

The FIR alleges that Kanojia had tweeted a morphed Facebook post by Sushil Tiwari of the Hindu Army, with the intent of defaming the latter.

The FIR notes that Kanojia’s tweet was objectionable and could have resulted in disturbing communal harmony, create tension between different communities, and hurt religious feelings, which can threaten law and order.

His wife Arora, however, had said, “He had not tweeted this at all. Someone edited that image to make it look so. I am 100 percent sure that he has not tweeted anything of the sort.”

This isn’t the first time Kanojia has had run-ins with the law. Earlier this year, an FIR was filed against him for making “objectionable remarks about Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on social media.

Several top political leaders and activists including Jignesh Mevani, Swara Bhasker and others tweeted in support of the campaign and demanded his release.

Here are some of the tweets from Monday’s campaign that demanded Kanojia’s release.

NOTE: The claims made in the tweets embedded below or the ideas presented in them are those solely of the users. Vartha Bharati does not guarantee the authenticity of any of the claims or does not necessarily endorse, support the ideas, views posted by any of the users. 

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Srinagar (PTI): Normal life in Kashmir was affected for the fifth consecutive day as partial restrictions on movement of people remained in force as a precautionary measure.

The restrictions were imposed on Monday after spontaneous protests broke out across Kashmir a day earlier against the killing of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israel joint strikes.

Chief minister Omar Abdullah on Wednesday held a meeting with civil society representatives and religious leaders as part of efforts to bring the situation back to normalcy.

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After the meeting, Abdullah appealed to people to maintain peace while expressing grief and anger in "mosques, shrines and Imambaras".

The government has shut educational institutions till Saturday, and reduced mobile internet speeds.

"Restrictions on the movement and assembly of the people continued in many parts of Kashmir on Thursday," the officials said.

A large number of police and paramilitary CRPF personnel were deployed across the city to prevent gatherings of protestors, the officials said.

They added that concertina wires and barricades were placed at important intersections leading into the city, while asserting that these were precautionary measures imposed to maintain law and order.

The iconic Ghanta Ghar in the city centre of Lal Chowk here continued to remain a no-go zone after the authorities sealed area with barricades erected all around it on late Sunday night.

The move to seal the Ghanta Ghar came after it witnessed massive protests on Sunday after Khamenei's assassination in the joint air strikes by the US and Israel.

This is the first time since August 2019 -- when Article 370 was revoked -- that protests on such a large scale have taken place in Kashmir.