Farmers Movement Archive

Media ‘pressuring us’ to say ‘farmers killed journo’: Kin

NIGHASAN (LAKHIMPUR KHERI): While local news channel journalist Raman Kashyap’s family has accused Union minister Ajay Mishra Teni’s son Ashish and his aides of murdering him in the Kheri violence on Sunday, his brother said there’s increasing pressure to blame the farmers instead. “My father and I have given the same statement to everyone — that he was crushed by a vehicle in the Union minister’s (Ajay Mishra Teni) convoy and shot at. But many journalists are now trying to cross-question us to make us say that the farmers beat him to death. That did not happen,” Raman’s brother Pawan told TOI. BKU spokesperson Rakesh Tikait had earlier said that Kashyap would be counted among the farmer “martyrs”. “My brother was a journalist but we are a family of farmers. What Tikait said was right,” Pawan said. “I have not received the postmortem report … I was told that there’s a procedure to attach our complaint to another FIR that has already been lodged. The FIR by farmers is the one with which ours is being attached.” Earlier in the day, a video with Pawan’s allegations against the media had been shared widely. “They are trying to put words in our mouths. That farmers beat him up. We said that didn’t happen. But the politics over this doesn’t end,” he says in the video. “One journalist came and said the autopsy report states he died of injuries from being beaten up with sticks. I ended up getting into an argument with him. He said had I not been the journalist’s brother, he would not have spoken with the civility he had … The autopsy report is not here but they’re making up stories. I was there at the mortuary. I saw his injuries. He had not been beaten up with sticks.” When asked how the theory came about, Pawan says, “There was a WhatsApp forward, on the basis of which I was being asked these questions.”

The Times of India

2021-10-07

India