On the run,publisher says human error

A court in Shillong on Tuesday issued an arrest warrant against Inder Mohan Jha,the Delhi-based director of Skyline Publications...

A court in Shillong on Tuesday issued an arrest warrant against Inder Mohan Jha,the Delhi-based director of Skyline Publications,after the police moved a petition seeking his arrest for an objectionable picture of Jesus Christ in a school textbook.

After Chief Judicial Magistrate M Challam issued the warrant,DSP Crime Vivek Syiem said he would soon send a team to Delhi to arrest Jha. He said the state police team would team up with the Delhi Police to investigate how the objectionable picture of Jesus holding a beer can and a cigarette got into the textbook.

The picture had caused an outrage in the Christian-dominated state,after St Joseph Girls Higher Secondary School first detected it in a primary school cursive writing textbook and filed an FIR against the publisher. Syiem said as of now the focus of investigation will be on the publisher with the printer and distributor of the book coming in later. Skyline had issued a frontpage advertisement on Monday morning apologising for the objectionable depiction of Jesus Christ.

Jha,meanwhile,is on the run. I apologise for the mistake. I have tendered my apology with a local newspaper in Shillong. It was a human error, he said. I am not in Delhi at the moment; I cannot say when I will be back. I should be back in three-four days, he said,refusing to disclose his current location.

Jha,40,claims to be the one-man show behind Skyline,which he started four months back. It was my first published set of books. I had printed textbooks for classes I to V,and had printed a total of 1,200 copies, he said.

I distributed 200 books in Shillong in December as the academic session had not started anywhere else, he said,adding that he had not distributed his books in any other state and was on his rounds across the country to do so when the controversy hit.

Jha,who would not give the location of his office,claims to have destroyed all remaining copies of his book. I had given the job of designing the book to a Delhi-based agency,and they seem to have lifted an offensive photo off the Internet, he claimed,again refusing to share the name of his designer. He said that he would initiate legal action against his designer once he returns to the city,but expressed ignorance of any case registered against him.

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Ranjith Singh of Students Book Stall,Shillong,which distributed about 120 copies of the book,said Jha had approached him in November or December. We stock so many publishers because most offer attractive discounts. We cannot be expected to be so certain about their antecedents. It is up to the school to approve the book after receiving the sample copies, he added.