A ‘Pakistani’ flag fluttering over a single-storied house in Biharsharif town shocked many on Thursday and when it was shown on the local channels, police acted and arrested landlady Shabana Anwar and her teenaged nephew Shakeb and filed an FIR against three persons. “Sedition case has been filed against the accused,” said Nalanda SP Kumar Ashish.
Police seized the flag hoisted on the rooftop of the house near a mosque in Muslim dominated Kharadi mohalla in Biharsharif. The SP said prima facie it looked like a flag of Pakistan. But 35-year old Shabana told the police that she had been hoisting this flag for several years after Eid as a religious commitment.
Police also arrested her nephew, who had “redesigned” the flag this year to make it attractive. But in that process he made it a replica of Pakistani flag. Shabana is illiterate and said she has no idea that this flag resembled that of Pakistan’s. Biharsharif town DSP Saifur Rahman said the matter was under investigation.
The flag controversy caught the imagination of the people as well as the political parties as it came up at a time when the Kashmir is boiling where hoisting of Pakistani flag is a routine.
In Patna last Friday, police filed a case against an organisation Popular Front of India which had taken out a procession in favour of televangelist Zakir Nayak. It was alleged that the pro-Pakistan slogans had been raised during the procession and later police arrested the Front’s secretary who was leading the procession and slapped him with sedition charge. The Front, however, clarified that the activists had raised slogan of Popular Front zindabad and not Pakistan zindabad.