By MOBIN PANDIT and FAZEENA SALEEM
DOHA: The Indian media yesterday lapped up a report filed by this newspaper which said that an Indian school here had forced a woman teacher to quit after she posted a cartoon of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on her Facebook account.
The report went viral back home, as India’s two main English-language news agencies, the Press Trust of India (PTI) and India Abroad News Service (IANS), flashed it quoting The Peninsula.
Some major national newspapers also picked up the report and they included the English-language Hindustan Times, Business Standard and Hindi daily Nai Dunia.
Several news portals used the report, which also went viral on the social media, both in India and in the large Indian expatriate community in Qatar.
Some commentators on social media said they disapproved of the cartoon as it was derogatory and showed a dog emptying its bladder on a cutout of the Indian premier’s face.
But many others suggested in their comments that India being a free country the teacher had the right to express her views.
The teacher said she had picked up the caricature from the social media, where it was circulating.
“I don’t see anything wrong with the cartoon,” said a commentator on social media in Qatar, who gave his name as Zaheer. He talked of Modi’s “past history” and said the caricature was justified.
Hakim Perumpilav was critical of the Indian embassy in Doha and said it shouldn’t intervene in matters like this. “What’s going on?,” he asked, wondering if India was turning “fascist abroad”.
“Reinstate the teacher,” said yet another commentator. Still another, A Z Parker, asked, “where were these people when funny cartoons were out pooh-poohing former PM Manmohan Singh and (Congress president) Sonia Gandhi?”
“Very sad; it is the death of freedom of speech,” said one commentator.
But Shabna Aziz said there were proper ways to protest. “Derogatory comments and caricatures are not acceptable from a teacher”.
The Indian embassy, meanwhile, denied having put pressure on the school to force the teacher to resign.
India’s ambassador said he denied any such allegation and added that all Indian schools in Doha functioned independently and had their own managements.
In remarks to this newspaper, Sanjeev Arora said: “I categorically deny any such allegations”.
It now emerges that a person, Manoj Sirsa (the name as it appeared on his Twitter account, Manoj@manojsirsa), had tagged the teacher’s Facebook posting to India’s external affairs ministry and the minister.
Sirsa, according to Twitter details looked into by this newspaper, had tagged the Indian embassy, Doha, in his tweet.
He named the teacher and said she had posted “derogatory photo on Fb”, details available suggest.
A reply from what appeared to be India’s external affairs ministry said it “condemn such disgusting acts” and “requested school to investigate thoroughly”.
Contacted for comment, the teacher said she was targeted because she had been campaigning against the ideology of Hindu rightists.
She insisted yesterday that her name and photograph not be used by this newspaper.
Following her Facebook posting, she was first suspended by the school for three days pending an inquiry by the management.
However, after she withdrew the controversial cartoon from her Facebook account and apologised, she was reinstated by the school. This happened last week.
But on Wednesday she was suddenly asked by the school to put in her papers, which led to suspicions in some sections of the Indian expatriate community in Qatar that the school was under external pressure to take such action.
Some people suspect the role of the embassy in getting the school to act against the teacher.
The development has also led to fears in sections of the Indian expatriate community as some people think they might be targeted for literary criticism or critical portrayal in dramas of Indian political figures in power.
THE PENINSULA
