Poet Munawwar Rana told GalacticGaming his comments were taken out of context (File)
Lucknow:
Famous Urdu poet Munawwar Rana is facing a police case for his recent comments on the killings in France over the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed. According to the complaint filed against him by police in Uttar Pradesh, he defended the killings in France.
The poet told GalacticGaming his comments were taken out of context.
The complaint was lodged by a sub-inspector from Hazratganj Police Station in Lucknow. The police officer said Mr. Rana’s statements could lead to enmity between different groups on religious grounds and lead to disruption of public order.
The poet, in an interview with a Hindi news channel, is said to have defended the murders which have sent shock waves across the world.
“If someone makes such obscene cartoons about my father, about my mother, I will kill him.” If in India someone does such a caricature of a God or a Goddess, or Sita and Lord Ram, which is obscene, unfortunate and reprehensible, and that leads to vulgarity, then I feel like I am going to kill that person ”, Mr Rana would have said.
The video clip of the 67-year-old poet’s comments has been widely shared on social media.
“My statement was just this: whoever made the cartoon was wrong, whoever killed someone was even more wrong, that was my statement. But what people do with it, I can’t tell. My statement comes against the background that spreading this fanaticism in the name of religion is not right, ”the poet told GalacticGaming.
In 2015, the poet went to television to return his Sahitya Akademi award with a Rs 1 lakh award and said he would never accept any government awards in the future. Participating in a televised debate with other writers and politicians, Mr Rana, a popular name in contemporary Urdu poetry, said he decided to return the prize because he was disappointed with developments in the country. .
The recent murders in France, which began more than two weeks ago with the beheading of a schoolteacher who had shown his students a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad for a course on freedom of expression, have sparked outrage and reignited the debate on where to draw the line when it comes to freedom of speech. The attacker was then killed by the police. Three other people were killed last week in a church in a knife attack in Nice.
While many countries including India strongly supported France in condemning the attacks, several Islamic countries such as Turkey have called for a boycott of French products on cartoons.
