Aam Aadmi Party leader Preeti Sharma Menon has filed a complaint with the Delhi Police's cyber cell on Thursday against Abhijeet Bhattacharya, which has led to an FIR being lodged against the singer. The charges are abusing a woman journalist and ‘outrage of modesty of a woman’.
Menon tweeted to the police commissioner about the singer’s use of offensive language on social media targeting a woman journalist. Her complaint explained that Abhijeet replied to her tweet with ‘abusive’ language. The controversy started with a single tweet by the singer, bizarrely, stating that the murder of an Infosys techie in Chennai, S Swathi,24, was the result of “love jihad”, wrongly amplifying that her attacker was a Muslim. Later when a Delhi-based journalist Swati Chaturvedi including jantakareporter.com’s editor-in-chief Rifat Jawaid responded to the tweet, objecting to his accusation, the singer had allegedly replied with abusive comments.
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It was 4th of July, on Sunday, Chaturvedi had also filed a complaint against the singer for allegedly being abusive towards her on Twitter. She also accused him of inciting communal hatred and spreading false information on Twitter. Then Abhijeet lashed out at her with offensive words and called her “an old woman” in his expletive-filled rant. “(He has been) calling me all sorts of loaded, sexually nasty terms. It all started because he has been tweeting this information in the Chennai case. And I called that out and said that such things can start off riots,” Chaturvedi said, as reported by Hindustan Times. The Twitter fight with her and other media persons then got a lot more worse. And, finally.....
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Abhijeet has been booked under Sections 500 and 509 of the Indian Penal Code and the Section 67 of the Information Technology Act. Earlier too, the singer got into trouble when he refered to people sleeping on roads to ‘dogs’ and defended Salman Khan in the hit-and-run case. The singer is known for his pro-Hindu stance and this isn’t the first time he is raking up such controversies. In the past, his negative statements against Pakistani singers and artistes has also gotten him plenty of media attention.
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