Former minister and senior BJP leader Choudhary Lal Singh has warned Kashmiri journalists to draw a line between reporting facts and supporting terrorists or face the fate of Rising Kashmir editor Shujaat Bukhari, who was shot dead by militants.
Singh's statement drew condemnation from the Kashmir Editors Guild and political parties.
The Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party urged Governor N N Vohra to immediately book and arrest the former minister, while the National Conference said this was a brazen attempt to muzzle the media in Kashmir and that his "open threat" merited "immediate cognizance" by the state police.
"Kashmiri journalists have created an erroneous atmosphere and I would like to ask them to draw the line," Singh had told reporters in Jammu yesterday.
"You want to live like what happened to Basharat," he said in an apparent reference to Shujaat Bukhari.
Shujaat Bukhari's brother Basharat Bukhari is a PDP leader and was the law minister in the PDP-BJP government, of which Singh had been a part, before the BJP withdrew from the alliance last week.
"Take care of yourselves and draw a line so that the brotherhood is not broken and it is maintained so that progress and development (of the state) is ensured, Singh said.
In a tweet today, the BJP MLA said, "There is need to draw a line between reporting facts and supporting terrorists and their sympathisers. Misinterpretation has become a norm and reporting facts a rarity. Journalistic freedom is absolute but not at the cost of nation and nationalism."
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content