Peeved at being put in the dock, the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) moved with unusual alacrity and served a notice to the Number 1 Odia news channel, OTV, the Naveen Patnaik government’s constant bugbear and also its favourite whipping boy. OTV’s crime? It had uploaded the clip, which had already gone viral, on its social media platform and sought a response from the BMC on the veracity of the claims made in it, on August 6. As if on cue, the Bhubaneswar-Cuttack Twin City police commissioner followed up by lodging an FIR against the channel for what it called spreading ‘false and misleading’ information about the Covid pandemic with ‘mala fide and mischievous’ intention. Next, it whisked away the two persons in the conversation on Sunday midnight, interrogated them all night at an undisclosed location before registering a case against them under Sec (B), 120 B of IPC, together with Sec 3 of the Epidemic Diseases Act and Sec 452 of the Disaster Management Act, arresting them and taking them on a three-day remand after producing them in court on Monday. True to form, the police went after OTV even before it verified the authenticity of the clip or identified its source.