Cop said he would tear out my beard, Lucknow journalist Omar Rashid says after detention amid CAA protests

It didn't matter that Omar Rashid, a correspondent for The Hindu newspaper, told the cops again and again that he was a journalist.

He says his repeated mentions of his profession didn't stop the Lucknow Police from detaining him without an explanation, accusing him of taking part of a violent protest against the amended Citizenship Act, threatening to beat him and tear his beard out, and asking him to "keep my journalism to myself, in abusive Hindi".

Omar Rashid says he was released -- and that apologies replaced abuse -- only when the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister's Office found out about his detention.

When the police let him go, they said he'd been picked up because of a "confusion", Rashid said in an interview.

"They knew my identity. I revealed to them at the very beginning who I was, and I gave them all the ID cards I had. They're saying after that there's confusion. I don't understand," he told India Today TV.

In fact, a constable who knew him was present during his detention and had seen him earlier in the day at a mortuary, he said.

Protests of the Citizenship Amendment Act, seen by critics as anti-Muslim, intensified this week after the Delhi Police was accused of using excessive force against college students on Sunday. Several people have been killed in recent weeks, eleven of them in Uttar Pradesh.

'LONG LIST OF EXPLETIVES'

Omar Rashid's account of the hours he spent in detention is being widely shared on social media. Senior journalists and politicians alike have condemned the police action.

Rashid said the Lucknow Police repeatedly brought up his Kashmiri background, accused him of hiding Kashmiris and asked him to reveal their whereabouts.

An activist who had been picked up with him was repeatedly beaten, he said.

One officer "said he would tear out all my beard and thrash me if I didn't answer his questions as per his liking. Since I didn't have my phone, I could not note down the long list of expletives used against me," Omar Rashid said.

"If this is how policing works in BJP-run UP, we may as well subtract that state from India’s democracy!" tweeted Congress MP Shashi Tharoor.

All this is taking place in the backdrop of a widespread agitation against the Citizenship Amendment Act, a hugely controversial new law fast-tracking naturalisation for illegal immigrants from six non-Muslim minority religious groups who fled persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Bangladesh.

Facing criticism both at home and abroad, the government has denied the charge that the law is anti-Muslim, and has made repeated appeals for calm.