A Malayalam TV anchor allegedly receiving thousands of threat calls, after she conducted the discussion on Mahishasur Jayanthi in her show.

Sindhu Sooryakumar, the chief coordinating editor of Asianet News TV has moderated a spirited discussion on the channel, on whether celebrating Mahishasur Jayanti could be considered an act of treason.

After that programme, the lady says that she has received over 2,000 abusive calls on her phone, allegedly from activists and sympathisers of various pro-Hindutva groups, accusing her of calling Durga a “sex worker” during the show.

Through the video of the show, it is spotted that, those two words were read out by V V Rajesh, BJP state secretary, while quoting from pamphlets that he claimed were distributed on the JNU campus and later produced in Parliament by HRD Minister Smriti Irani.
   
Following the complaint filed by Sindhu, Kerala police arrested five people. “All of those arrested are connected to BJP, RSS and Hindu groups, including Sri Rama Sena,” a police official said.

One of the five members caught by the police, said that, he got Sindhu’s number from a WhatsApp group called Sanga Dhwani, where a member shared her personal number and asked others to call and abuse her “for a Facebook post on Durga”.

The other three, who were arrested from Kannur, are members of Sri Rama Sena, the pro-Hindutva group involved in the Mangalore pub attack of 2009 and several other cases of moral policing.

Speaking about the calls she received, Sindhu said, “Most of the abusers called me a prostitute and abused me. Some threatened me while others didn’t even know what the charge was. I got a call this morning from someone asking whether I was Durga. Another person called me sometime ago, saying I had posted something against Durga on Facebook, and that he wanted to abuse me for that.”

Sindhu said that BJP’s Rajesh assured of any kind of support in the issue. “He said that he has clarified the situation to many of the party’s cadre who had called him. However, his party’s leadership still hasn’t disowned the rumour being spread in their circles,” she said.

“All they have done is issue a general statement about freedom of the press,” she said. On Monday, BJP’s Kerala chief Kummanam Rajasekharan evaded questions on the issue.

“The BJP is a party that supports freedom of the press,” he told reporters. Later, in a Facebook post on his official account, Rajasekharan wrote that his party “has nothing to do with this issue”, she further added.
 
The investigators, the police official said were tracing the unknown person, who first posted the rumour about Sindhu using derogatory words to describe Durga, along with the tracing of the whatsapp groups that circulated the journalist’s personal number.    

Those who could not reach Sindhu through her personal phone, has started calling to Asianet News Studio with “hundreds of calls” continuously, due to which the channel operations are also disturbed.

Meanwhile, the state’s journalists organized a protest and March to the Kerala Secretariat yesterday, seeking a strict action against the culprits.

By Phani Ch