NEW DELHI, Dec 23
Bihar YouTuber Manish Kashyap, who had been lodged in jail for nine months for allegedly making and sharing fake videos of Bihar migrants being harassed in Tamil Nadu, was released on bail on Saturday.
Kashyap, a resident of West Champaran, had surrendered in March this year at the Jagdishpur police station in the district after Tamil Nadu Police and Economic Offences Unit (EOU) of Bihar lodged separate cases against him. Later, the Tamil Nadu police got the custody of the YouTuber and he was sent to Madurai jail where he was lodged for over four months. In August, he was brought back to Bihar and produced before a Bettiah court, which sent him to Beur jail of Patna. Kashyap has been granted bail in three cases.
Talking to reporters after his release, Kashyap said, “I had raised issues of unemployment and migration and had nothing to do with those purported videos. I was maligned by the media as well, but I had full faith in the judiciary.”
One of the three cases against Kashyap is related to him trying to pass off a 2019 photo of his arrest in another case as “police action against him in the latest case of fake attack on migrants”.
Kashyap was arrested twice in 2019, once for allegedly damaging the statue of King Edward VII in Bettiah and later for allegedly roughing up a Kashmiri shopkeeper in Patna’s Lhasa Market after the Pulwama attack.
Of the seven cases against him in West Champaran, Kashyap has got bail in six. The West Champaran police had in 2021 confiscated his paternal home in Dumri Mahanwa village after he allegedly threatened the then manager of State Bank of India’s Paras Pakri branch.
Additional Director General of Police N H Khan, who heads the EOU, is investigating the role of Kashyap and three others from Bihar in the fake videos cases.
One of his associates, Rakesh Tiwari from Gopalganj, had told the police that they had shot one of the videos at Jakkanpur, Patna. Another accused in the case, Aman Kumar, was arrested from Jamui. The third accused in the fake video case, Yuvraj Singh, has also been nabbed.
Kashyap, who completed his graduation in civil engineering from a Pune college in 2016, started his YouTube channel ‘Sach Tak News’ in 2018. He tried to make his channel stand out by questioning government officials on problems concerning the common man.
The son of an Army man, Kashyap contested the Assembly election from Chanpatia constituency in West Champaran in 2020 as an Independent candidate and finished third.
