IN THE EARLY HOURS OF MAY 7, 2025, India launched Operation Sindoor on Pakistan in retaliation to a brutal attack by militants on tourists in the Baisaran Valley of Pahalgam on April 22. In response, over the night of May 6 and 7, India’s border regions came under the target of ceaseless shelling from Pakistan, with Jammu and Kashmir’s Poonch district at the forefront of the attacks. The shelling lasted four days, killing thirteen residents of Poonch and forcing more than 80 percent of the population to migrate to safer areas.
Qari Muhammad Iqbal, 47 in May this year, was one of the thirteen residents who lost their lives in the conflict. Iqbal was a Quran teacher at the Zia-ul-Uloom Madrasa in Poonch city. On May 7, Iqbal’s younger brother, Qari Farooq Ahmed, asked him to return to the family’s native village in Mandli’s Baila, but around 6:30 PM that day, shelling from Pakistan took the Poonch district by terror. “Iqbal bhai said that it wasn’t safe to travel and stayed back. I even asked him to go to Seri Khwaja, where I teach at a Madrasa but he refused,” Ahmed told The Leaflet.
Around 7 PM, Iqbal went to the Zia-ul-Uloom madrasa in Poonch city. Shortly afterwards, the building came under attack — shelling hit the outer premises of the madrasa. Iqbal and four students of the madrasa were caught in the destruction as flying pieces critically injured them. He was taken to the District Hospital Poonch. By around 8 PM, Iqbal had lost his life.
Pradeep Sharma, a former BJP MLA from Poonch was present beside Iqbal’s bed at the time of his death. His funeral was held at half an hour past midnight on May 8.
“The next morning, we started getting calls from relatives and friends about several news channels branding him a terrorist, a member of the Laskar-e-Taiba’s camp based in Azad Kashmir’s Kotli.” Ahmed recalled, “Our mourning was shadowed by the ghastly rumours running around about our beloved brother.”
Three major newshouses were clearly at the forefront: News 18, ZeeNews and Arnab Goswami’s Republic TV. While News18 associated him with Lashkar-e-Taiba, ZeeNews stated that Iqbal was a militant associated with the Pakistan-based militant organisation Hizbul-Mujahideen . “Mitti mein mil gaya most wanted athankwadi Qari Mohd Iqbal” — The most wanted terrorist Qari Mohd Iqbal has been buried in the dust — one headline ran. “Ghaati mein dhoond rahi thi agencies…Bharat ki air strike mein hua dher” — Agencies were searching for him in the valley… He was taken down in India’s air strike — read another.
With the help of Mohammad Rashad, a station house office in Poonch and the local media, the family was soon mobilising all the efforts to rectify the rumours that had shattered, in a thoughtless moment, the life of dignity that Iqbal had lived. Alternative fact-checking websites like AltNews also picked up on this to fact check the misinformation surrounding Qari’s credentials. Only News18 issued an apology. But for the majority of the country, Qari died a terrorist, his long beard and skull cap only helping the tarnishing endeavors of the media.
A legal struggle ensues
Almost two months after his death, on June 23, his family took legal recourse to hold ZeeNews and News18 accountable. Legal notices were sent to both of them.
Sheikh Shakeel Ahmed explained that the family had first “sent legal notices to News18 and ZeeNews, demanding a damage control amount of 5 crores from each of them.” In the three months since, Ahmed told The Leaflet, “only the legal team of News18 responded to the 3-week ultimatum of the legal notice, replying that they spread the disinformation due to factually incorrect inputs.” ZeeNews never responded to the legal notice.
Qari Iqbal’s younger brother, Qari Farooq Ahmed, has been at the forefront of this legal battle against the news channels. Ahmed remains resolutely faithful to the judicial system. “My brother was a well-reputed citizen of Poonch. He had a clean police record and no FIRs against him,” he told The Leaflet, a slip of agitation in his voice, “For news channels to declare him a dehshatgard, terrorist, was highly unjust to my brother who lost his life in the shelling. He was martyred.”
Tariq Manzoor, Qari Ahmed’s nephew explained that he sees the compensation amount of 5 crores each from both the news channels as a just penalty. The legal notice to both the channels mentions that “apology of any kind cannot repair the damage and it is only the damages/compensation which will indemnify the loss caused to the deceased and his surviving members of the family”.
In a separate proceeding, Poonch-based lawyer and activist Sheikh Mohammad Saleem, took the matter, first to the Poonch police authorities on May 22 to submit an application for an FIR, and after no response, to the court on May 28. This was how a Poonch court of sub-judge Shafeeq Ahmed, on June 28, ordered the police department of the city to file an FIR against the news channels under Sections 353(2) (public mischief), 356 (defamation) and 196 (1) (promoting enmity between different religious groups) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita , 2023, along with Section 66 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (dishonest or fraudulent act using computer), and submit a compliance report within a week. On June 28, the Poonch court noted similarly that the apology by the news channels on different fora did “not cure the mischief” caused by “irresponsible reporting.”
More than two months since the order, while the police have recorded the evidence from the family members, no further updates have occurred in the case. Speaking to The Leaflet in September, Saleem expressed concern that the police may have been delaying the investigation.
A David and Goliath tussle by most counts
Separate from this court order, the misreporting around Iqbal’s death sent the family down a path of legal conundrum - after losing a loved one in destructive violence, violence tied intrinsically to life and living in the valley, and losing them again to reputational assassination by the country’s biggest news channels - what can one seek from justice? Soon, Iqbal’s family knew that what they needed was accountability from the virulent news channels which had been at the forefront of the disinformation campaign (an analysis by AltNews in late 2022 revealed that while Zee Media was the second leading misinformation publisher in India, Republic World had shared as many as ten fake stories in 2022 alone).
Ashutosh Gupta, a veteran journalist who previously worked as a news anchor and managing editor at IBN7, explained that there were three critical measures for seeking accountability from news channels in India, “One can directly write to the concerned news channel and if it feels responsible, they will accept their mistakes as inadvertently and run corrections. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen very often these days.”
The second measure, he noted, was the News Broadcasting & Digital Standards Authority (‘NBDSA’), a self-regulatory body that represents private channels and is currently headed by former Supreme Court judge Arjan Kumar Sikri. It sets up a quasi judicial hearing and if the committee feels that the news channel has presented something with harmful consequences, a fine or apology is imposed. Even if this is not that efficient, it can potentially bring some sort of justice. The third measure is legal recourse through the judiciary. “As hasslesome and expensive it can be, it is the most efficient of the three,” Gupta said.
There was a trend, Gupta explained. Since 2014, news channels have become increasingly complicit in contributing to State narratives, noting that Qari Iqbal’s matter was similar. “There is a lack of accountability and strong legal teams of such news channels keep delaying the legal process. Despite everything, citizens have to believe in the judiciary,” he added. The apology by News18, one of the two channels accused of propagating misinformation, made Qari’s family’s case stronger.
News18’s legal team, in its reply to the legal notice wrote that they broadcasted fake information about Iqbal due to factually incorrect inputs (they even connected him to the 2019 Pulwama attack) and that they apologised shortly after the factual aspect was clear. Moreover, they noted that they ran the corrected news of Qari’s passing due to Pakistani shelling on prime time. They have also apologised for the inconvenience caused to the family.
Iqbal has left behind two wives and eight children who have been allocated a clerk job and a compensation of around Rs 12.5 lacs so far by the Indian government. Home Minister Amit Shah visited Poonch to hand over job letters to the families of the victims of the shelling, including Qari’s family. This acknowledged him as a victim of Pakistani shelling beyond the press releases and clarifications from local authorities.
Mumtaz Ahmed, Iqbal’s nephew told The Leaflet that the local leaders and residents of Poonch did not believe in the rumours. “Everyone from the District Commissioner to BJP-Congress leaders visited us,” he added. But as the family sees it, it is not so much about who believed the rumours and who did not. Rather, it was the collective trauma of witnessing Iqbal’s image being torn to smithereens even as the family struggled to come to terms with his death and mourn. At the heart, this is what the legal battle stood for.
Tariq Manzoor told The Leaflet earlier this week that the family has now filed an FIR and a defamation suit against the news channels. It is a David and Goliath battle by most counts - a family from the remote Poonch valley pitted against a conglomerate of the mainstream media machinery. Skewed are the resources, power, and the transiency with which stories of injustice from Kashmir are forgotten. But Qari Ahmed’s optimism is resolute, almost in a symbolic way, “We will fight to reclaim our brother’s dignity even if it takes a long time. He should have died a martyr."
“Neither country should engage in war,” Mumtaz Ahmed told The Leaflet, “It is the marginalised at the border that suffer because of war.” In an ideal world, he said, his uncle should not have lost his life in the spur of a geopolitical conflict, in whose historical backdrop Kashmir has resiliently survived and lived.
Beyond the legal notices and compensation amounts, Qari’s family has found themselves in a battle that raises the most critical questions on the obliterated standards of mainstream journalism and ethics in India. Their legal claims, rooted in the aspiration for justice for Iqbal’s legacy, challenge at a fundamental level the might of India’s multi-crore misinformation industry, and the many riots, many deaths, many injustices they have inspired.