Henna Bakshi Booked for Facebook Post; Hopes Police Will Take 'Lenient View'

A decade ago she was in the news for bravery. In September 2012, Henna Bakshi was back in the news — this time booked by the police for what she had written on their Facebook page.

Bakshi, 22, says she won the Geeta Chopra bravery award as a child for nabbing a burglar. On Friday, September 14, she and another person were booked at Chandigarh's Industrial Area police station under various sections of the Information Technology Act, on a complaint by a traffic police personnel who alleged she had posted abusive comments on the Chandigarh traffic police's Facebook page.

Her account is that the anger came from frustration, not malice. Her friend's Multi Utility Vehicle was stolen from a house in Sector 18 on August 11, and she describes the process of registering an FIR — and the silence afterward, with no police contact on the progress of the case — as "stressful." She says she turned to the police's Facebook page to highlight what she called the common man's plight and to ask what efforts were being made to recover the car, and she denies posting anything objectionable or targeting any individual.

The case was an early Indian example of the friction between citizens and authorities on social media: a public grievance posted on an official page met with a criminal complaint under the IT Act rather than a response to the grievance itself.

Whether the comments crossed the line into abuse or were plain-spoken criticism of an unresponsive system was the question the courts, not the headlines, would decide. Bakshi, whose father appealed for the police to take a lenient view, maintained she had done nothing more than ask the police to do their job.