Twitter account identifying itself as ‘Dalit thinker’ Dr Mukesh Harane, who currently lives in Germany, on Tuesday took to Twitter to ask about wellbeing of journalist Rana Ayyub’s father. He was responding to a tweet by Ayyub on the ‘Abba Jaan’ activism where some people on Twitter are sharing stories about their fathers (Abba Jaan) after UP CM Yogi Adityanath said that in previous state government, the ration hardly reached the ones who needed owing to appeasement policies of previous regime.
Ayyub tweeted how her ‘AbbaJaan’ is not afraid of anyone’s ‘Abba’ (father).
To that, Dr Harane said how he fondly remembers her father, Waqif Saheb, whom he met years ago in Berlin once.
Dr Harane said that Ayyub’s father got so drunk he kept calling up prostitutes throughout the night. “He was indeed a fearless man,” he said. He asked about his wellbeing and said that he sends his regards.
However, Rana was quite upset about the tweet.
The Ayyub siblings were upset about Dr Harane’s comments and Rana dared Dr Harane to not delete his tweet. The siblings also referred to the Dalit activist as a ‘rat’. Ayyub also said she is filing a complaint against Dr Harane.
However, in subsequent tweets, he clarified that he mistook Rana Ayyub for someone else, and it was not her father he met in Berlin but some other Waqif who was from Peshawar, Pakistan.
In subsequent tweet, he said that he got confused about identities and said that the person he mistook for her father was someone else from Pakistan. He said that he is learning to use Twitter in his late 60s and was looking for meeting his old friends. He apologised and said that he is a reputed doctor practicing in Germany.
As per Dr Harane’s Twitter profile, he is a ‘Dalit thinker’ and a homeopathy doctor and sexologist based in Heidelberg, Germany.
However, a reverse search of the image shows that the image is actually of General (Retd) Daya Rathnayake of Sri Lanka. While Rana could have ignored the comments thrown at her, she ended up amplifying the same by retweeting a tweet by someone who had less than 200 followers at the time of this report.
This is not the first time Rana Ayyub has been subjected to muck being thrown at her.
In September 2017, disgraced cop Sanjiv Bhatt had taken to Facebook to allege that one ‘female journalist’ had an amorous relationship with one IPS officer investigating the Sohrabuddin encounter case as well as one ‘lawyer-activist’ who was fighting the 2002 riots victims’ cases.
While Bhatt had neither confirmed nor denied if the post was about Rana Ayyub, who wrote a book titled “Gujarat Files” which was supposed to be an exposé on Sohrabuddin encounter case and 2002 riots, he had given enough hints to imply he has written about her.
Many had speculated that the ‘lawyer-activist’ he was speaking about was likely Mukul Sinha, who passed away after fighting his battle with cancer.
Back then, neither Ayyub nor Mukul Sinha’s son Pratik Sinha, who runs propaganda website Alt News, had fact-checked Bhatt’s claims. Neither did Bhatt apologise like possibly fake account masquerading as ‘Dalit thinker’ Dr Harane.