BHOPAL: A 21-year-old youth in Rajgarh district of Madhya Pradesh has been in jail for the last five months over a WhatsApp message forwarded by somebody else.His family members insist he is paying the price for ending up as the “default admin” as the actual administrator left the group after the “objectionable” forward. But police say they took action on the evidence they had then.Junaid Khan, a BSc student and resident of Talen town in Rajgarh, was arrested on February 14 this year and booked under the IT Act and IPC Section 124 A (sedition). He was part of a WhatsApp group in which the admin, Irfan, had posted an objectionable forward. Some locals filed a complaint at Talen police station and a case was registered against Irfan and the “admin”.Police say Junaid was the WhatsApp group administrator when the case came to their notice. His family says otherwise. “Junaid was a member of the group, but not the admin. When the matter came to light, he was in Ratlam on family work. It was then that the admin left the group and another member became admin by default. But he, too, quit. Junaid became group admin by default. But he was not the admin when the post was originally shared,” Junaid’s cousin, Farukh Khan, told TOI.Junaid couldn’t write his examinations as the court denied bail because he was booked for sedition, said Farukh. “We approached senior police officers and complained with the CM Helpline but to no avail. No one listened to us that he was not the admin when the message was posted,” Farukh claimed.When TOI contacted the then Pachore police station in-charge, Yuvraj Singh Chouhan, who investigated the case, he said, “Junaid’s family members did not say this when he was arrested. Now, after the challan has been put up in court, they say he was the ‘default admin’. If they have any evidence, they should produce it in court. Irfan, too, was arrested and when the matter came to our cognisance, Junaid was the admin of the group. There was no evidence or any other way to ascertain at that time who was the admin of the group when the post was shared by Irfan. We filed the challan on the basis of the evidence available with us.”Rajgarh supreintendent of police Simala Prasad told TOI the same thing. “We are verifying whether other people were also admins of the same group. The family hasn’t told us that Junaid had become default admin. Rather, they have complained that some other people were also admins of the group at that time,” she said.

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