The Uttar Pradesh (UP) Police have filed a First Information Report (FIR) against a group ‘ Kranti Sena’ in Muzaffarnagar who conducted checks at a market to ensure that no Muslim man applies Mehndi on the hands of Hindu women ahead of Hariyali Teej, an event celebrated during the holy month of Shravana on August 10, reports The Indian Express.
In a viral video, members of the party are seen asking shopkeepers whether they have arrangements for applying henna. The video then cuts to the Kranti Sena General Secretary Manoj Saini, who says, “We have checked several shops and appealed to the owners to not employ Muslims as they indulge in ‘love jihad’ and trap our women while applying mehndi.”
In UP’s Muzaffarnagar, Kranti Sena, a right wing outfit went on a checking drive to ensure no Muslim applies “Mehandi” to women on Teej. pic.twitter.com/nSOMeWG9bN
After the video went viral, the police filed an FIR against the group. While talking to The Indian Express Aprit Vijayvargia, SP City Muzaffarnagar said, “It was brought to our notice after a video was uploaded on social media. Security has been heavily deployed in public places since there are many festivals. There is no law and order situation.”
Shopkeepers in the area said that they did not quite understand what the group wanted from them. “How can we not employ people on the basis of religion?” one of them asked.
According to The Quint, the FIR is against 51 members of the Kranti Sena, 11 named and 40 unnamed.
H&M has launched its collection in collaboration with Kolkata-based Indian designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee on Thursday.
Talking to Vouge about his collaboration with H&M, designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee said that there is a wonderful quote by Rumi that sums it up: “What you seek is seeking you.” He received an email from H&M saying they were interested in partnering. “I thought it was too good to be true, and probably spam, but it wasn’t. H&M’s designer tie-ups are what legends are made of.”
He continued: “This is part of the big fashion dream because it is a validation of your work—it means they believe that my product is desirable enough to translate itself to the mass market. We have created hysteria in Indian couture (we’re the most copied brand here) but that makes us inaccessible, and yes, I do get a lot of requests to do something more affordable. This was the perfect opportunity to do that. Plus, I got to work with denim for the first time, which was exciting.”
Sabyasachi further said that it took him six months to create the artwork for this collection.
This is H&M’s first global Indian designer collaboration. The collection will be available in stores in 18 countries, including India, the US and Britain.
Tokyo Olympics officials say they’re replacing Goto’s gold medal after Takashi Kawamura, the mayor of her hometown of Nagoya, bit the first one during a ceremony despite Covid-19 concerns, BBC News reports. The International Olympic Committee is reportedly set to cover the costs.
“With support from the International Olympic Committee and in line with her own intention, Goto’s medal is now set to be exchanged for a new one,” Tokyo organisers said, per Reuters.
Kawamura previously came under fire for taking off his mask to bite the medal, including from Toyota, which owns the softball team Goto plays for, NBC News reports.
The company said it was “unfortunate that he was unable to feel admiration and respect for the athlete” and “extremely regrettable that he was unable to give consideration to infection prevention”. Kawamura apologised for acting in “an extremely inappropriate way,” adding, “I am fully aware that I should reflect on that.”
Pyaray Afzal star Ayeza Khan is playing a TikToker in her big-budget drama Laapata costarring Ali Rehman Khan, Sarah Khan and Gohar Rasheed.
Her character Geeti makes musical and dance oriented videos including songs from some Bollywood chartbusters of late Sridevi. She will also be donning Kajol”s avatar from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.
The Meray Paas Tum Ho star took to her Instagram handle to share her recreation of Aishwarya’s look from her Blockbuster film opposite Shah Rukh Khan, Mohabbatein.
Star singer Nazia Hassan’s brother and co-composer Zohaib Hassan has said that his late sister was poisoned by her husband Ishtiaq Baig.
In an interview with Samaa TV, the Silsilay singer said that Baig was poisoning Nazia and this caused her cancer.
Nazia had one of her ovaries removed after she developed ovarian cancer, she was in remission when she went back to her husband and then soon she developed throat cancer that puzzled her doctor, he added.
The acclaimed guitarist also mentioned that his sister was so tired of all the mistreatment at Baig’s hands that she went for divorce before her death. He regrets letting his sister marry Baig.
On August 13, it will be 21 years since Nazia Hassan, often dubbed Queen of Pop, passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer.
As per reports, Ishtiaq Baig has announced that he will take Zohaib to court and sue him for Rs1 billion for defamation, he also claimed that the Disco Deewane star was the love of his life and they married despite her being diagnosed with cancer.
Veteran actor Durdana Butt passed away on August 12 after being on a ventilator for eight days at a hospital in Karachi. The Dudgugi star recently appeared on Asim Raza’s blockbuster Parey Hut Love.
Members of the fraternity expressed their grieve and prayed for the departed soul on social media:
Durdana appa, an impressive combination of acting finesse and educationist. The million dollar smile that reached your eyes, made all of us your fans. May Allah grant you a higher place in Jannah tul Firdous! Aameen pic.twitter.com/8IVa5KIcso
Cyber Crime Wing of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has detained two men in Lahore — one of them a foreign national — on charges of looting people while posing as women on Facebook, Samaa has reported.
The Cyber Crime Wing has arrested one foreigner and one local man named Darlington and Asif Ali, respectively.
FIA Additional Director Shahid Hussain said that during the investigation, the suspects said that they duped people by uploading pictures of beautiful girls. They chatted with different men and then looted them by asking them for dollars.
As per the FIA, “They force youngsters and women to send them inappropriate pictures and then blackmail them.”
Earlier, FIA booked model Ifrah Khan on charges of blackmailing a businessman and demanding extortion of millions from him.
A report released by the Digital Media Wing (DMW) of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting titled, ‘Anti-State Trends: Deep Analytics Report’ is deeply misleading and based on assumptions instead of facts, The Current has discovered after analysing the report.
Glaring errors and almost comical additions, the report makes a correlation between analysing hashtags on Twitter to determine if someone is anti-state and is responsible for starting trends against Pakistan.
Before analysing the report, The Current researched and spoke with analysts who are well-versed with digital analysis. There is no record of any report on hashtag analysis to determine trends at a government level in any country at any time. Pakistan is the only country that has created a report based on hashtag analysis. Worldwide, hashtag analysis is considered to be deeply unreliable since it cannot understand what is written in the tweet – it is just able to see what is being discussed.
WHAT IS THE REPORT?
The report is a compilation of hashtags that created trends that the government deems anti-state. The report shows information collected about hashtag trends and then lists pages of screenshots that show different Twitter handles sharing tweets that have the ‘anti-state’ hashtag. They do not differentiate between users and also label ‘influencers’ – people with a following who have tweeted or retweeted/replied to the hashtag.
In effect, the report seems to declare all the users in the report as anti-state, until one prominent journalist got them to add a disclaimer last night.
HOW WAS THE INFORMATION COLLECTED?
Since the whole report is based on hashtag analysis, it will be considered to be unreliable data collection and cannot be considering as a legitimate report in any institution.
When The Current reached out to General Manager of the Digital Media Wing (DMW), Imran Ghazali, he responded to the question of faulty analysis of hashtags by saying, “The purpose of this report was to ascertain factual data and to analyze social media trends that were anti-state, Data was collected after analysing Pakistan Twitter Panel from June 2019- August 2021. Those hashtags were marked for data collection where the content of tweets were planned and propagated through a network to spread anti-state trends.”
According to a source in the government, the information used is public. “Publicly released data is accurate. It’s no rocket science, anybody with a credit card can get this data. Hence made public.”
From The Current’s analysis, the data was collected by using a web application called, ‘Tweeps Map’, which is open to the public.
From our findings, the 134-page report has 85 pages that have screenshots of tweets, which means that 63.4 per cent of the report is based on screenshots of people who are using a certain hashtag that the government has identified as being anti-state. The number of tweets that are in these 85 pages amount to 666 tweets out of which 142 tweets are from three accounts, which means that 21.3 per cent of the tweets used in this study came from three people.
After further analysis of the three accounts, The Current discovered that all three accounts had a combined following of less than 11,000.
We discovered that the hashtag #SanctionPakistan was ‘analysed’ for 41 days, Pakhtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) hashtags were clubbed together as “PTM Trends Tantamount to National Security” (the report doesn’t list which hashtags were used within this topic) and were ‘analysed’ for 22 months, #AbAwamSmashNahiHogi was ‘analysed’ for one day, and #StateKilledUsmanKakar, #IsraeliJetinPakistan, ‘JUIF Anti State Trend’, was ‘analysed’ but no time duration is given.
WHY AND WHEN WAS THE ‘DISCLAIMER’ ADDED?
The report was released Wednesday evening around 5:30PM and a few hours later a disclaimer was added to the report. According to journalist Fereeha Idrees, the disclaimer was added after she raised the issue with the DMW for being highlighted in the report as a ‘replies with the most followers’ account.
“I have always raised my voice against any propaganda against our state but the way the report was compiled, it made me look as one of the culprits and suddenly social media was rife with messages calling me anti-state,” Fereeha told The Current, “When I made the query, I was given the following explanation.”
The explanation given to Fereeha by the DMW stated, “All the accounts in the report doesn’t mean they took part in the anti-state activity…It shows the whole journey of the trends/hashtags, so in this case Fareeha Idrees replied/rebutted on the Israeli related trend and that’s why it mentions ‘Replies with most mentions’ in the report.”
After the DMW response, Fereeha demanded that they add a disclaimer to the report. A disclaimer was added which stated, “If an account is listed in a report – it doesn’t always imply that the content of the tweet is Anti-State. Some accounts have engaged/replied with an anti-state hashtag to rebut. But since they used the hashtag their accounts got listed in the report.”
Imran Ghazali admitted to adding the disclaimer after Fereeha raised an objection about the fairness of the report.
The Current asked Ghazali about how they have divided the report to show which people mentioned were anti-state and which ones were considered pro-state. Ghazali refused to directly answer the question and stated, “We have not given any number for pro-state or anti-state accounts but showed below the hashtags we highlighted the accounts which contributed to a certain hashtag – tweets, top contributors, replies etc.”
When we pressed him to answer the question about how the people selected were separated into anti-state and pro-state, he said, “If an account is listed in a report – it doesn’t always imply that the content of the tweet is Anti-State. Some accounts have engaged/replied with an anti-state hashtag to rebut. But since they used the hashtag their accounts got listed in the report.”
The implication of his answers show that the report does not – and cannot- differentiate people’s points of view on a tweet, which means that someone who has posted a ‘pro-state’ tweet condemning the hashtag will also be added into the list of someone who is considered anti-state.
WAS THE GOVERNMENT ALLOWED TO USE THE APP ‘TWEEPSMAP’?
The Current reached out to TweepsMap, which was the primary analysis app used by the government for this report. The maps and information all have the Tweepsmap link on the maps and all charts in the report. We asked the CEO of TweepsMap Samir Al-Battran if they considered the analysis of the report to be authentic since it used their app service. Samir told us, “The government of Pakistan is not authorised to use our service. We will investigate how they got access to our analysis and get back to you on this.”
We asked him for further details, asking if an individual used their service for analysis for a government funded report, would that be against their rules, to which Samir replied and said, “…Government agencies go through a vetting process before we allow them to use our service. We were never in communication with the government of Pakistan…Yes, [using the app without informing us what it is for] would be a misrepresentation and is definitely against our rules.”
The Current asked Ghazali if they used the application and if they had authorisation to which he said, “We used different tools/APIs including our internal tools to analyse data”. We asked him since TweepsMap is the only one that is being listed in the report, if they had gotten a subscription for the government of Pakistan to which we got no response.
WHAT ELSE IS IN THE REPORT?
We analysed the tweets used in the 85 screenshots present in the report and found some comical discrepancies. One retweet had the #SajalAly hashtag along with the ‘anti-state’ hashtag ‘#AccountabilityofZarbeAzb’. We went through the Twitter account to find that the tweet mentioned in the report was a meme of Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan.
A tweet by former Interior Minister Rehman Malik is included in the #SanctionPakistan list in which he is criticising Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the US.
The tweet Rehman Malik retweeted
The report also includes references to “a group of Wikipedia Admins most of whom are based in India,” giving state level credibility to an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. With glaring spelling mistakes and analysis based on unauthorised data, the summary of the Digital Media Wing Deep Analysis report has been summed up by one senior data analyst based in Singapore, “That just goes to show… they don’t understand how it works.”
Prime Minister Imran Khan, while talking to foreign journalists on Wednesday, to explain the unrest in the region, referred to the Pashtuns as ‘xenophobic’.
“We have a larger Pashtun population here in Pakistan than in Afghanistan and they’re probably the most ‘xenophobic’ people on earth,” said PM Khan.
“They fight each other normally but when it’s an outside [force], they all get together,” said the prime minister.
Twitterati reacted to PM Khan calling the Pashtuns ‘xenophobic’. As per the Oxford dictionary, ‘xenophobia’ means literally, fear of foreigners or strangers, though the term is often used to refer to attitudes of hatred or contempt rather than pure fear.
The word ‘xenophobic’ means having or showing a dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries.
National Assembly member Mohsin Dawar tweeted, “Shocking to see that in 2021 a PM would label an entire ethnicity as xenophobic.”
Shocking to see that in 2021 a PM would label an entire ethnicity as “xenophobic”. I can’t believe how he can even think that considering all the Pashtuns around him. Expect these Pashtuns to defend this shameful racist characterisation rather than question and correct him. pic.twitter.com/U9ws8EkJg6
A Twitter user wrote, “Imran Khan should apologise to all Pashtuns. We are not xenophobic we are peaceful people who just want to live in peace.”
Imran Khan should apologise to all Pashtuns. We are not xenophobic we are peaceful people who just want to live in peace. Stop demonising us when we are victim of state oppression. pic.twitter.com/Kzdde08WTG
Another Twitter user requested, “I think time has come that IK should only be giving written speeches/media talks with editing/homework on each question. No more live talks. Restrict him now.”
Journalist Murtaza Solangi questioned, “Is he [Imran Khan] a social scientist or social anthropologist?”
He told journalists that he is not waiting for Biden’s call. His NSA complaints to Yanks why they are not calling him. Now he dubs all Pashtuns as Xenophobic. Is he a social scientist or social anthropologist? What is he? #SmallPeopleInBigOfficespic.twitter.com/ABDfA3CqRB
Chief Justice of Pakistan Gulzar Ahmed has nominated Justice Ayesha A. Malik for the elevation to the Supreme Court, tweeted senior journalist Hasnaat Malik.
Breaking: Chief Justice of Pakistan Gulzar Ahmed has nominated Justice Aysha Malik for the elevation to the Supreme Court. Justice Aysha will be first female judge who is going to elevate to the Supreme Court of Pakistan in history.
Justice Ayesha will be the first woman judge in the history of Pakistan to be elevated to the Supreme Court.
She will become the first woman Chief Justice of Pakistan after Justice Yahya’s retirement in January 2030.
CJP Gulzar has summoned JCP meeting on September 9 to consider her elevation to SC. She is number 4 on LHC judges seniority. Justice Aysha wil work 10 years as SC judge. She will become first female CJP after Justice Yahya retirement in January 2030 for more a year. https://t.co/mwRqCrCrqV
Justice Ayesha A. Malik is one of the only two women judges in the 40 esteemed judges of the Lahore High Court. According to Women in Law, a group working for equal opportunities for women lawyers in Pakistan, only 15 per cent of women judges are part of the Pakistani judiciary.
Justice Ayesha Malik’s name came to fame after her landmark judgment against the ‘two-finger test’ or two-finger virginity test of sexual assault survivors.
Justice Ayesha Malik, 54, received her early education from Karachi Grammar School and her LLM degree from Harvard Law School in the United States, after which she returned to Karachi to practice law.
